Re: ide-floppy [Fwd: Updated ATAPI FORMAT_UNIT patch.]

[Alan Cox]

> One of my concerns is that we don't take the ide-floppy driver in a
> different direction to the other removeable media drives.

In general the others do it raw via scsi commands and sg.

> For Alan Cox, could you back out Sam's patch for now. It will be back
> soon.

When the new one is sorted. I'm not going to feed it to Linus anyhow. For
the moment there are quite a few people glad of it 

> > > > * Ability to open the device even if there's no disk in the drive.  This
> > > > is needed by the userspace app to probe the device.  The open path sends a

Other devices allow this for O_NDELAY only.

> > 1) A separate minor device that will open whether or not there's a
> > formatted disk in the drive.  I don't like this approach.

Ugly. Thats a lot of extra devices.

> > The O_EXCL trick seems the cleanest way to be able to access the device

Use the same O_NDELAY cdroms do

> > Suppose that two months from now the Clik drive gets new firmware that
> > reports a slightly different model ID, say "IOMEGA Clik! 80 CZ ATAPI".
> > Or, perhaps, it's a new model of the Clik drive, that shares the same
> > shortcomings.
> 
> Yep. Looks extremely possible.  

Nod. I've already suggested a seperate blacklist table of device id/flaws
as SCSI does