From: smackinla@cc.curtin.edu.au (Pat Mackinlay) Subject: ANNOUNCE: Driver for XT HD controller Date: Fri, 2 Oct 1992 12:53:44 GMT
This is a simple driver that allows XT hard disk controllers (at least the
DTC 5150x) to be used under Linux. You may ask yourself why anyone would
want to use an XT hard disk controller on their 386+ machine. The reason
that I have is that I had a couple of old MFM hard disks sitting around that
weren't being used for anything else. XT hard disk controllers have the
small advantage of being able to coexist with IDE type drives as well, so
there was no reason (apart from lack of a driver) that they couldn't be used
in the same machine. In fact, I have 1 IDE drive, 1 SCSI drive and 2 XT
drives all running quite happily together in the same machine!
Note, however, that XT controllers are _slow_! I have timed my old disks
at 27kB/sec going through this controller, which kind of means that you can
only really use them for archival type storage (no swap partitions <grin>).
The driver was finished under Linux 0.98, but it should work without major
difficulties under almost any version from 0.97 up (not sure about 0.96).
The driver is on tsx-11.mit.edu::incoming/xtdisk.tar.Z at the moment. The
one thing that I forgot to mention in the docs is the creation of the /dev
files. These follow the convention of the "hd" devices, ie: drive 1 uses
xda1 for primary partition 1 etc, while drive 2 uses xdb?. The major number
is 12, with minors in the same sequence as for "hd".
If you find any bugs in the driver (or even if it works perfectly!), please
don't hesitate to email me with a report.
Please note: I have grabbed major device number 12 for use with this drive.
If anyone out there was planning on using that, can you please contact me
and we'll work something out.
Pat -- Have a day!