[parisc-linux] Floppy disk support for 9000 series (715, 755, etc.) workstations.

[James K. Love]

On 1/17/2007 2:16 PM, Matt Taggart wrote:
> "James Love" writes...
>> They use a HP-proprietary TEAC SCSI floppy disk, which appears to be an
>> IDE drive with a SCSI-IO/FDC board piggy-backed on it. Any idea whether
>> the TEAC drive is the one that HP won't provide the documents for?
>
> I hope you are able to make progress on a driver, that would be cool. But I
> don't think anyone from HP is going to be able to help. :(
>
>> Regardless, the drive works in MKLinux, so hopefully someone knows
>> something about how it works...
>
> Yeah it sounds like there is hope of getting it working then.
>

On 1/24/2007 11:28 AM, Grant Grundler wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 23, 2007 at 03:51:32PM -0500, James K. Love wrote:
>> In an attempt investigate further, I installed MKLinux on a 715, and the
>> scsi floppy drive was supported through some combination of the MACH
>> kernel and it's hosted Linux kernel.  I've looked through the MKLinux
>> source code, and it appears that the MACH scsi driver had some support
>> for flexible disk drives (which I assume is the floppy drive), but I'm
>> uncertain if this is the only missing piece to the puzzle.  If anyone
>> has any additional info/insight, I'd really appreciated it.
> 
> If you can figure out what's missing between linux and MKlinux there
> is a good change it could get added. The closer you get to providing
> a patch, the more likely it will get included.
> 

I finally figured some of this out.  I ported the MACH flexible scsi disk
code over to the 2.6 kernel, and I can now mount/read/write with my HP TEAC FC-1
drive.  The modifications I made were inside the scsi device (sd) driver, which
is similar to where they were inside the MACH kernel.  This is obviously not
ideal, since the device major is for a scsi disk, but the drive is really a
floppy.  This breaks some user-space floppy apps like fdformat.  There really
should be a new floppy driver similar to the cdrom driver, but these changes may
not work with any other scsi floppy drive (are there any others?).  I only have
a few HP OEM TEAC revs to test with here.

Bottom line... The scsi disk driver could be patched, but it may only provide
partial/experimental support for this drive without extensive changes.  I'm
traditionally a user-space developer, so I'd appreciate any advice/thoughts
before I get knee deep.  Also, if someone could pass along a few links to some
procedural docs about properly submitting kernel code/patches, I'd really
appreciate it.

Thanks,
James L.





















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