From: drew@ophelia.cs.colorado.edu (Drew Eckhardt)
Subject: Re: FS questions
Organization: University of Colorado at Boulder
Date: Tue, 7 Apr 1992 22:23:11 GMT

In article <1992Apr7.144852.18692@athena.mit.edu> mstype!mdf (Matthew Francey) writes:
>well, i've read the FAQ sheet and i am unimpressed. :-)
>
>or more precisely, i am showing remarkable restraint and calm in the
>light of the information on this FAQ list.  i will refrain from rapid,
>perhaps unthinking, decisions.  i will not drool *too* much.  wild,
>incoherent singing in the middle of the night will be kept to an absolute
>minimum.
>
>hence, like any potential guinea pi..., err, customer, i have some
>more questions before i sign my life away to LINUX:
>
>1) is there a driver for my beautiful Adaptec 1542B card?  how difficult

Tommy Thorn's driver has been incorporated into the latest 
release of the SCSI drivers, which I will put up RSN.
What the people on the SCSI mailing list got  :
 
---
Ok, here's the deal :
1.  I found a clash between the seagate driver and 
	gcc2.x, which has been rectified.  Basically, gcc2 decided 
	"Gee, it would be good to save bx and si."  This changed 
	the stack frame around, moving things by 8 bytes,
	the assembler code used the 
	old version of the stack frame, things got corrupted and 
	may or may not have worked correctly.  

	The binaries were compiled with gcc1.37? for 
	the SCSI stuff, 2.x for the rest of it, so this 
	should only have been a problem for those 
	recompiling the whole mess.

	Of course, since bx and si were being changed,
	and not preserved as gcc may have expected them
	to be, this could also have caused problems.

	
2.  I have a damaged directory under my source tree, and need 
	to finish fixing fsck to repair it.  This takes
	priority over getting out binaries + sources, as 
	I can't get the former out if I don't do a build,
	and won't send out the later without testing them
	first.  

After the second problem is rectified, and Linus's new patches are 
applied, new distributions will be put out including tthorn's 
adaptec drivers.  

>2) is the file system size *really* limited to 64 megabytes?  this is a
>   really serious flaw if true for (a) simple aesthetic reasons and (b)
>   practical reasons for those with large disks ...  and if true, can this
>   be easily fixed?  i have absolutely no care in the world about
>   compatibility with MINIX file systems, or any other for that matter.
>   i just want peak, or close to peak, fs performance.
>

With Minix FS, yes.  

This is what VFS takes care of - it provides an interface
between file related system calls (ie open, read, etc), 
and different file systems such as the Minix FS, Berkely
FFS, LFS, Tar FS, FTP FS, let your imagination run wild.....

>otherwise, LINUX is looking like what i an looking for.  i have had it with
>COHERENT and its 64+64 business and disgusting disk performance...
>
>but its still a toss up between 386 BSD or LINUX.  but i haven't found out
>anything about the BSD other than the fact it exists, is free, and a friend
>tells me it panics alot...

It also requires an entire hard disk to itself, and has no 387 
emulation in the kernel, which makes using stock compilers....
tricky.