Re: OK to use timer to periodically check device status?

[Jamie Harris <jamie.harris@uwe.ac.uk>]

Is this the same sort of polling that the Amiga's used to use to wear out
their drives in 3 months?  Don't the mtools offer something similiar
(with the warnings about wearing your floppy drives out).  Of do the new
floppies provide some nice flag that is set on media change?

cheers

Jamie...

On Fri, 18 May 2001, Kevin P. Fleming wrote:

> I'm a true kernel programming newbie... been browsing the code for years,
> and made some small patches, but now it's time for something more
> significant...
>
> The current ide-floppy driver has no useful "media change notification"
> mechanism, and this causes problems for me and others. I can rectify this,
> but the mechanism to do so will require polling the device (probably once
> per second or so) for its status.
>
> After looking around, it appears that the best way to accomplish this would
> be to create a lightweight timer handler function (minimal code included)
> and add a kernel timer to invoke that once per second. If the handler finds
> significant work to do, should it do it, or queue a task for "later" to do
> that? (that work could cause the drive's media to spun up and the partition
> table to read, among other things)
>
> Anything significantly wrong with this approach? My intention is to make
> this feature a kernel config selectable option if you choose to include the
> ide-floppy driver (and mark it experimental, of course).
>
> -
> Kernelnewbies: Help each other learn about the Linux kernel.
> Archive:       http://mail.nl.linux.org/
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