Re: buggy ide?

B. Galliart (bgallia@luc.edu)
Thu, 30 May 1996 16:27:27 -0500 (CDT)


On Wed, 29 May 1996, Sheldon E. Newhouse wrote:

> I just installed pre2.0.8 and noticed the following message
>
> ide0: buggy RZ1000 interface: disabled read-ahead
>
> What is this?

Congradulations!! You are the owner of yet another data corrupting
feature of the ever so great Intel Pentium architechure, showing once
more that Intel Inside "quality testing" is not worth ****!

What it comes down to is multitasking operating systems have to disable
a feature that should improve performance because it does not function
correctly on the RZ1000 EIDE controller chip. If you run OS/2 (without
the OS/2 warp RZ1000 fix patch), Windows for Workgroups in 32 bit disk
access mode, older versions of the Linux kernel, or old versions of
Windows NT then some of your files might not be missing characters when
they where written to disk (or the filesystem itself may have been
corrupted). I /think/ the bug only effects you if your using more than
one IDE (although the report that the Linux kernel found the RZ1000
should still come up). Be sure to always say Y to the RZ1000 support
under the "Floppy, IDE, and other block devices" configuration
section.

More information is available at http://web.yahoo.com/pci/faq.html

Maybe someone should add this URL to the CONFIG_BLK_DEV of the
linux/Documenation/Configure.help

- Ben Galliart (bgallia@luc.edu)