. The main device node now supports automatic density selection for
commonly used media densities. So you can stuff your 1.44 MB and
720 KB media into your drive and just access /dev/fd0, no questions
asked. It's all that easy, isn't it? :)
. Device density handling has been completely overhauled. The old way
of hardwired kernel density knowledge is no longer there. Instead,
the kernel now implements 16 subdevices per drive. The first
subdevice uses automatic density selection, while the remaining 15
devices are freely programmable. They can be assigned an arbitrary
name of the form /dev/fd[:digit]+.[:digit:]{1,4}, where the second
number is meant to either implement device names that are mnemonic
for their raw capacity (as it used to be), or they can alternatively
be created as "anonymous" devices like fd0.1 through fd0.15,
depending on the taste of the administrator. After creating a
subdevice, it is initialized to the maximal native density of the
respective drive type, so it needs to be customized for other
densities by using fdcontrol(8). Pseudo-partition devices (fd0a
through fd0h) are still supported as symlinks.
. The old hack to use flags 0x1 to always assume drive 0 were there is
no longer supported; this is now supposed to be done by wiring the
devices down from the loader via device flags. On IA32
architectures, the first two drives are looked up in the CMOS
configuration records though. On PCMCIA (i. e., the Y-E Data
controller of the Toshiba Libretto), a single drive is always
assumed.
. Other specialities like disabling the FIFO and not probing the drive
at boot-time are selected by per-controller or per-drive flags, too.
. Unit attentions (media has been changed) are supposed to be detected
now; density autoselection only occurs after a unit attention. (Can
be turned off by a per-drive flag, this will cause each Fdopen() to
perform the autoselection.)
. FM floppies can be handled now (on controllers that actually support
it -- not all do these days).
. Fdopen() can be told to avoid density selection by setting
O_NONBLOCK; this leaves the descriptor in a half-opened state where
only a few ioctls are accepted. This is necessary to run fdformat
on a device that uses automatic density selection (since you cannot
autoselect on an unformatted medium, obviously).
. Just differentiate between a plain old NE765 and the enhanced chips,
but don't try more; the existing code was wrong and only misdetected
the chips anyway.
BUGS and TODOs:
. All documentation update still needs to be done.
. Formatting not-so-standard format yields unpredictable results; i
have yet to figure out why this happens. "Standard" formats like
720 and 1440 KB do work, however.
. rc scripts are needed to setup device nodes with nonstandard
densities (like the old /dev/fdN.MMM we used to have).
. Obtaining device flags from the kernel environment doesn't work yet,
thus currently only drives that are present in (IA32) CMOS are
really detected. Someone who knows the odds and ends about device
flags is needed here, i can't figure out what i'm doing wrong.
. 2.88 MB still needs to be done.
Its main purpose is to adapt automatically to the floppy parameters
(in particular the track size for efficient reading), and to allow a
simple error recovery for CRC-errored sectors. Requires the newly
added fdc(4) options.
