From: ericy@hal.gnu.ai.mit.edu (Eric Youngdale) Subject: Re: status of QIC-80 driver on tsx-11. Date: 14 Dec 1992 03:11:27 GMT
In article <1992Dec13.055410.27559@sol.UVic.CA> pmacdona@sanjuan (Peter MacDonald) writes:
>By the same token, finding a CDROM that works with an IDE based PC
>would be great (could a CDROM be another read-only IDE drive,
>theoretically?). Having to plunk in a SCSI board seems futile,
>and adds to the cost and complexity of setting it up. I am
>unenlightened in this area. Anyone who would care to talk about
>it to me, please drop me a line. My main rational is establishing
>how feasible or when a CDROM of SLS would be practical/affordable
>for most of us. I certainly am not willing to retool my entire
>system just to have it, but I would consider spending $300-$400.
>Also, SCSI seems to be a bit problematic.
I would guess that most people are having good luck with their scsi,
and it is only a small minority that are having troubles. Even then, it
appears that most of the scsi troubles fall into two categories. Most of the
scsi problems with the new code have now been fixed, although there are
intermittent reports of kernel crashes with people using the ST0x.
Motherboards that are unable to do bus mastering in a reliable way continue to
be a problem for some people, and this is something that we can do little
about. Admittedly it does cost a little more up front, but no one has been
able to get any solid technical information on a non-scsi cdrom drive since the
interfaces are proprieatary. I suspect that some of them are IDE drives of
some kind or another, but they all apparently require their own special
controller and apparently there is no standard way of adding a second IDE
controller.
>Also, is an EXT FS feasible for a CDROM? Or are we doomed to using
>the ISO formats?
No the ext fs is not feasible for the cdrom, because the iso format
works just fine, and it is an international standard format for cdroms. The
Rock Ridge extensions make the cdrom look just like a unix filesystem, so
I can think of no good reason to try and use the extfs on a cdrom.
-Eric