Re: Bug - SCSI and IDE drives

[OKUJI Yoshinori]

From: Chris Wedgwood <address@hidden>
Subject: Re: Bug - SCSI and IDE drives
Date: Sat, 30 Dec 2000 01:15:22 +1300

> can someone comment as to how other OSs handle this? I'm pretty sure
> FreeBSD gets it right

  I don't know what FreeBSD does, because I haven't tracked the recent
development. But I guess that it does a similar thing with OpenBSD. In
OpenBSD, BIOS drives are probed in virtual 8086 mode and compared with
OS devices using checksums (CRC32). I think NetBSD also performs the
same way, though they are not fully compatible. In Multiboot, I/O
ports are used, rather than checksums, because the former should be
more reliable. (I'm considering adding information on checksums into
Multiboot Specification as well, though.)

  As you mentioned, Linux should be blamed here, anyway. However, I
heard that someone wrote a small utility which calls vm86 syscalls to
probe BIOS drives on Linux in user level, so it may be useful for us
to include the code in the grub shell. If you are interested in the
utility, see the archive of <address@hidden>.

Okuji