Commit 52eab33a authored by Adrian Bunk's avatar Adrian Bunk Committed by Linus Torvalds

[PATCH] mark BLK_DEV_PS2 as BROKEN

Andries Brouwer proposed this patch with the following comment:

As observed earlier, ps2esdi was broken as a module, and the passing of
geometry boot parameters is broken.  But does it still work with kernels
2.3 or later?  I think it does, but failed to verify that.

I found an IBM PS/2 model 70-A21 with 8 MB and 120 MB ESDI disk.
Tried a few distribution boot floppies to see whether they would boot.

Slackware has special ibmmca bootdisks.
SW 3.3 - Linux 2.1.43 - boots fine
SW 4.0 - Linux 2.2.6 - hangs
SW 7.0 - Linux 2.2.13 - boots fine
SW 8.1 - Linux 2.4.18 - boots, but every single command is killed by OOM
SW 10.0 - Linux 2.4.26 - kernel panic: no 386 supported

Then Debian:
Woody - Linux 2.2.10 - boots fine, but the rootdisk hangs
Sarge - Linux 2.4.27 - does not recognize the ESDI disk, and the rootdisk
 crashes by OOM.

So, good luck with 2.1 and 2.2 kernels, only failures with later kernels.

What about other people? The two major Linux/MCA sites were
http://glycerine.itsmm.uni.edu/mca (also referenced in Documentation/mca.txt)
but it doesnt exist any longer, and http://www.dgmicro.com/mca/,
which still exists ("last update: Jan 28 1999"), but the binaries
it refers to live on ftp.dgmicro.com, which isn't there anymore.

Concerning the speed:
I measured this ESDI disk under Linux as transferring 50 kB/s,
that is 4% of the speed the IBM specs claim. Also other Linux users
complained that the disk is much faster under DOS.

My proposal for this patch would be to get it into one 2.6 kernel (is it
too late for 2.6.11?) and wait if anyone was still using it and screams,
and remove it a few months later otherwise.
Signed-off-by: default avatarAndrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: default avatarLinus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
parent 068e379d
......@@ -42,7 +42,7 @@ config MAC_FLOPPY
config BLK_DEV_PS2
tristate "PS/2 ESDI hard disk support"
depends on MCA && MCA_LEGACY
depends on MCA && MCA_LEGACY && BROKEN
help
Say Y here if you have a PS/2 machine with a MCA bus and an ESDI
hard disk.
......
Markdown is supported
0%
or
You are about to add 0 people to the discussion. Proceed with caution.
Finish editing this message first!
Please register or to comment