Time to kill fdc ?

[Hans Ottevanger]

On 02/10/13 12:46, Daniel O'Connor wrote:
> 
> On 10/02/2013, at 22:14, Poul-Henning Kamp <phk at phk.freebsd.dk> wrote:
>>> I've used it in 7.x to read install.cfg for a semi automated install process.
>>>
>>> I didn't see any panics, but then again install.cfg is a pretty small file.
>>
>> On 7.x I got consistent panics about bounce-buffers.
> 
> 
> Hmm strange, I am not sure I have requisite hardware at work any more, all of the suitable machines were shipped.
> 
> In any case I am in no position to maintain FDC as I no longer user it as part of my install process.
> 
> --

I still use those old 1.4 Mbyte diskettes quite often (ancient archives
of experimental data, exchanging data with retro-computers, etc.), but
these days I mostly (but not always) use a USB diskette drive.

But I just did an experiment on an old Pentium 4 system here, using the
fdc driver and 8.3-STABLE as of early December (r243900). I read several
diskettes using "dd /dev/fd0 /dev/null" and everything went flawlessly.

The only issue I have seen with fdc over the years/releases is that
around 7.x old DD diskettes (maximum of 720 kbyte) stopped working.
Attempting to write them failed with a lot of retries, but never
resulted in a panic. Strange enough they do work with my USB drive ...

Could it be that the drive that Poul-Henning is using is worn out a bit?
Not that the system should be panicking in that case, but it could at
least explain why we see different thing happening.

Kind regards,

Hans