ImageDisk project is canceled

[Sean 'Captain Napalm' Conner]

It was thus said that the Great Tony Duell once stated:
> 
> > As long as there are no critical timing issues, and you don't need
> > interrupts it's not hard.
> 
> That's the problem. To determine the sector layout there _are_ critical 
> timing issues.
> 
> To read or write a given sector there are no real problems. You load the 
> floppy controller (and DMA chip) registers with the right values, it goes 
> off and does it. It doesn't matter if your task is switched out at the 
> end of that, the data will be there when your task runs again, etc.
> 
> But to read the IDs, it appears you _have_ to submit the next command as 
> soon as you get the results from the current one, or risk missing a 
> sector. And as far as I can see there's no way to be sure of doing that 
> on a multitasking system.

  The only way I see this happening is to modify the floppy device driver to
support a call to do this.  I don't know the low level details involved (do
you issue the command and wait for an IRQ, or just keep polling?) but I
wouldn't attempt to do such a thing in userland if it's that time critical.

  -spc ('tis just another ioctl() away ... )