Hello again,
I was told, that superformat does not work on m68k machines. Is this a know problem? A bug report against the Debian package can be found at
It is reported that on an Amiga2000 with a DD floppy drive, fdutils 5.4-20020222 and kernel 2.2.20 the following error occurs:
root@aahz:~>superformat /dev/fd0 get drive characteristics: Function not implemented
It is rumored, that this is a general problem of the Linux kernel for the m68k architecture. Is there any way to work around this? Or is m68k unsupported?
Jochen
PS.: If you answer to this mail, the Debian bug tracking system would be glad to receive a copy (via Cc:) at 78915-forwarded@bugs.debian.org.
On Sun, Jul 07, 2002 at 09:00:52PM +0200, Jochen Voss wrote:
It is rumored, that this is a general problem of the Linux kernel for the m68k architecture. Is there any way to work around this? Or is m68k unsupported?
AFAIK, this is an m68k linux kernel limitation.
On Sun, Jul 07, 2002 at 02:06:21PM -0500, Taral wrote:
AFAIK, this is an m68k linux kernel limitation.
Yes, I know. But fdformat is said to work, so formatting floppies should not be completely impossible.
Do you know, is anybody working on the m68k kernel floppy driver?
Jochen
On Mon, Jul 08, 2002 at 12:29:11AM +0200, Jochen Voss wrote:
On Sun, Jul 07, 2002 at 02:06:21PM -0500, Taral wrote:
AFAIK, this is an m68k linux kernel limitation.
Yes, I know. But fdformat is said to work, so formatting floppies should not be completely impossible.
Do you know, is anybody working on the m68k kernel floppy driver?
I'm afraid not. I suggest you ask on the linux-m68k list (linux-m68k@lists.linux-m68k.org).
AFAIK, this is an m68k linux kernel limitation.
Yes, I know. But fdformat is said to work, so formatting floppies should not be completely impossible.
Do you know, is anybody working on the m68k kernel floppy driver?
Nope. It works, why should anybody tamper with it?
Adding the missing ioctls to the Amiga floppy driver does not seem to make sense (though it would be easy: just add a fourth drive type for user defined parameters at the head of the drive type list, then set unit[drive].type to &drive_types[0] and modify those parameters if a matching set isn't found).
Disclaimer: I don't even know if the floppy hardware can be programmed to support arbitrary formats. Drive formats are selected by opening the corresponding device on the Amiga.
CC: to Geert who might know more about Amiga floppy hardware.
Michael
It is reported that on an Amiga2000 with a DD floppy drive, fdutils 5.4-20020222 and kernel 2.2.20 the following error occurs:
root@aahz:~>superformat /dev/fd0 get drive characteristics: Function not implemented
It is rumored, that this is a general problem of the Linux kernel for the m68k architecture. Is there any way to work around this? Or is m68k unsupported?
This rumor might be substantiated by a quick look at the Atari and Amiga floppy drivers. My prediction: the ioctl in question isn't implemented, or the ioctl data size mismatches.
Both Amiga and Atari implement FDGETPRM. Atari also implements FDSETPRM and FDDEFPRM (and those used to work at the time they were written).
Michael