[Date Prev][Date Next] [Thread Prev][Thread Next] [Date Index] [Thread Index]

Re: cd now working



On Thu, 26 Jun 1997, Paul Wade wrote:

:On Thu, 26 Jun 1997, Rick Hawkins wrote:
:
:> > This means you finally got the CD drive working?
:> 
:> Another one, actually.  I plugged it into the controller, inserted the
:> module, and mounted with no problem.  THe other drive is indeed bad :(
:> Gee, it was all so easy with a working piece :)
:> 
:> However, it does strike me as a problem that the bad drive can hang the
:> system.  Is this a bug, or acceptable behavior?
:
:If the scsi card is well-designed and functioning properly, this is
:unacceptable behavior for device driver software. A bad peripheral on the
:scsi side of the card shouldn't lock a system. There is a rare exception
:where the initial access to a bad component triggers a power supply
:overload.

However, there are many, many devices out there that are broken out of
the box.  3Com is famous for this.  There are plenty of poorly designed
SCSI hbas, and devices out there ... 

In short, many times there is a software problem, but the software is on
a chip on the device.  Kinda hard to fix that if you're joe average
user.

I'm not disputing that some drivers could be better written. On the
other hand, isn't it problematic to "fix" stupid hardware using
software?  (Case in point: CMD 640 IDE interface.  They work in Linux,
but they're butt slow, since CMD hadn't the foggiest idea what they were
doing when they designed the chipset.  At least I can *use* a CMD 640
with Linux ... Win95 really gets excited when it finds one present)

:+----------------------------------------------------------------------+
:+ Paul Wade                         Greenbush Technologies Corporation +
:+ mailto:paulwade@greenbush.com              http://www.greenbush.com/ +
:+----------------------------------------------------------------------+
:+ http://www.greenbush.com/cds.html             Special Linux CD offer +
:+----------------------------------------------------------------------+
:
--
  Nathan Norman    :    Hostmaster CFNI    :    nnorman@cfni.com
    finger nnorman@cfni.com for PGP public key and other stuff
Key fingerprint = CE 03 10 AF 32 81 18 58  9D 32 C2 AB 93 6D C4 72
--


--
TO UNSUBSCRIBE FROM THIS MAILING LIST: e-mail the word "unsubscribe" to
debian-user-request@lists.debian.org . 
Trouble?  e-mail to templin@bucknell.edu .


Reply to: