Andreas Mohr,
>
> OK, I just thought a followup on my own mail would be nice here to see
> what I suggested before (see end of mail for the old text).
>
I was wondering what to do next. I didn't see anybody come to a
conclusion on this idea so I left it rest. It takes somebody higher up
than me to go about adding configuration variables....
> But now that I'm in the process of heavily rewriting CD-ROM labels and serials
> and drive stuff, I thought "why not add this part, too ?".
>
> I think a very easy way to do this kind of stuff is using a new "BIOS" boolean flag.
> And as we all know that floppies have BIOS (i.e. int 0x13) IDs of 0, 1, 2, ...
> and HDDs have IDs of 0x80, 0x81, ..., the assignment is no problem at all.
> And other wine.conf device types aren't available for BIOS IDs anyway.
>
> I.e.
>
> [Drive A]
> Path=/dosa
> Type=floppy
> Label=FloppyA
> Serial=87654321
> Device=/dev/fd0
> Filesystem=win95
> BIOS=1
>
> [Drive B]
> Path=/dosb
> Type=floppy
> Label=FloppyB
> Device=/dev/fd1
> Filesystem=win95
>
> [Drive C]
> ;Path=/dosc
> ;Path=/smb/roland/c
> Path=/wine
> Type=hd
> Label=MS-DOS
> Filesystem=win95
> BIOS=1
>
> [Drive D]
> Path=/dosd
> Type=hd
> Label=WINDOWS
> Filesystem=win95
>
> [Drive E]
> Path=/dose
> Type=hd
> Label=LINUX-PORT
> Filesystem=win95
> BIOS=1
>
> would give us the following IDs for the drives:
> A 0 (first floppy with a "BIOS" flag)
> B --
> C 0x80 (we know it's "Type=hd")
> D --
> E 0x81 ( "" )
>
> So A would be the first "physical" BIOS floppy, whereas B wouldn't be
> configured as a BIOS device; ok, it is a floppy, but it does NOT have a BIOS
> flag.
>
Could be done. Maybe an auto setting to have wine detect the settings.
Some of the data returned by int 0x13 requires knowing physical properties
of the drive. Can the BIOS variable include this data or should wine go
about faking the drive capacity and the like?
> I don't think directly assigning BIOS IDs instead of just telling Wine to
> assign BIOS IDs would be better.
My original idea was automation to save the user configuration settings,
but you seem to have the only comment and you're against it. Why not
expand the ID in the config file to tell wine something usefull? What data
do you want returned by INT 0x13?
> OK, that way you could assign ID 0 to floppy B and ID 1 to floppy A (reversed),
> but that could horribly break some programs and IMHO you don't have any
> useful advantage. And of course you confuse newbies even more ;-)
>
Maybe it would break the programs. If we have a level of abstraction
between Wine and the hardware, then we're in control of where the hardware
appears to be. It's all virtual drives anyway. (Cable lengths in one of
my system has my 5 1/4" drive set up as my A floppy and the 3 1/2" set as
the B. Reversing this would have an advantage.)
> OK, so much for this stuff.
>
> Now about the dangers of raw block writing:
> I think we should assume that as soon as a [Drive X] has a "Device=" entry,
> it can be used for DOS int 0x25/0x26 raw sector reads (given the accessability
> of the device file, of course. Wine won't give a warning if it's not, BTW).
> And as soon as a drive has a "BIOS=" entry, it can be used for BIOS int 0x13
> raw block device reads, too.
> And now I suggest adding a "RawWrite=1" flag that tells Wine that writing
> to the device via either DOS or BIOS access is allowed.
Why not extend the BIOS flag to include this data? You've only had BIOS
flags of 1 this far.
> In case RawWrite is set to 1, I'd emit a BIG FAT WARNING upon EVERY Wine
> startup telling that this could cause data loss.
>
Give the user the ability to shut off this warning <G>. That would annoy
some people a great deal after awhile. Default the warning to ON, but give
it an off setting.
> That's it.
>
> The only thing I need to know now is:
> 1. Is this viable ? Please think of any problem you might see with that
> assignment ! Think of many very different test cases.
> 2. Do my new [Drive X] entries have good names or should that be changed ?
> 3. Maybe it's not to have the DOS and BIOS writing configuration option
> combined. Just tell me your opinion here.
>
I'd combine these two into a single flag. Since INT 0x13 does more than
just return the type, drive size for example, it might be easiest to tell
BIOS what to tell the program. It would also allow you to fake additional
floppy drives when you need them and would be very usefull when you have
more than one drive mapped to partitions on the same drive.
-Robert 'Admiral' Coeyman
--
http://www.corner.net/admiral/
May you live as long as you wish and age but a single day.
[Telnet to telnet.corner.net]
