A small word of warnig: linux looks like a unix, but I implemented it from scratch, and with very little litterature on how things "should" be done. In fact the only things I knew were how the interface should appear to the user: the result is not the same as either minix, sysv or bsd when it comes to the kernel innards. Some of the choises I made worked out well, some not so well. So far nothing has been a total disaster: most things have been relatively easily adaptible to the linux kernel (de...

I was reading misc.books.technical and thought someone on here might be interested in this. I'm a new subscriber, so hope this hasn't been posted before. Writing UNIX Device Drivers By George Pajari (c) 1992 Published by Addison-Wesley ISBN 0-201-52374-4 323 pages, Paperback $32.95 This book provides application programmers with definitive information on writing device drivers for the UNIX operating system. It explains, through working examples, the issues related to the design and imp...

After seeing a couple of people asking this same question, I decided I'd reply to the list instead of individually (sorry to the majority who probably know this). It is normal behavior for fdisk to report the errors about /dev/hd5, etc, if you do not have a second hard disk. I am not sure which of the following is correct, however 1) fdisk has it hard coded to check a second hard disk 2) fdisk checks on all /dev/hd*'s I am not able to check since I am not at home, but suffice to say that ...

I just tried using version 0.10 of "bootimage" to run version 0.11 of "rootimage". The system comes up fine. I can access the harddisk ok, for example by running "cp /dev/hd0 /dev/null". But when running "fdisk", I get: /dev/hd1: ..stuff about partition 1... /dev/hd2: ..stuff about partition 2... /dev/hd3: ..stuff about partition 3... harddisk I/O error dev 0305 block 0 and the program terminates. Now device 0305 is /dev/hd5 (ie. 2nd harddisk), but I don't have a 2nd harddisk. Does linux for...

The current suggested fix is to wait for 0.12: this particular problem should be solved (knock wood). If you cannot wait for 3 days, there were some timeouts you can change, but I forgot which: they are in blk_drv/hd.c. I /think/ this was solved in the VM prerelease (on amaru), but that one has other problems (memory size hardcoded for testing). Linus