Misc uport bugs and observations

[Jon Zeeff]

I recently spent lots of time trying to get a new drive and
controller installed on my Everex '386 machine running Microport '386 unix
2.2.  I had lots of problems and learned the following.


Dcopy doesn't seem to work.  A dcopy from one 4096 drive to another seemed to
work ok, but fsck found many errors (too many to fix).

When using a WD1006-WAH controller, the system will hang if it encounters a
drive error.

Drive error messages don't list the drive #.  It would also be nicer if they
listed the block number for use with mkpart -A.

In the install process, the -V and -v options don't work.  You must enter
all the bad sectors by hand and hope that the list supplied with the drive
is complete.  Mkpart will find bad sectors, but it won't mark them as bad.

Uport unix doesn't seem to reset the disk and try again when it encounters a
disk error.

Uport promises that people waiting for the non beta version of Merge 
that they were promised 30 days ago will be shipped a copy in two 
weeks.  We'll see.  

When splitting a drive between dos and unix, there doesn't seem to be a way
to have the first portion of the drive used for unix and the second used for
dos.  I wanted to do this because the first portion of the drive had fewer
bad sectors.

Hopefully I'm wrong on some of these things.

On a 4096 drive, a WD1006 controller does about 235k/sec with 1:1
interleave.  A normal controller with 1:3 does about 125k/sec.  Both
test were done with "/bin/time cp /dev/dsk/0s1 /dev/null" and using
real time on a unloaded machine.

Here is the bfi<->sector chart I came up with for 1:3 interleave.  I have no
idea if it is correct.

Sector		Bfi
1		100+
2		1900+
3		3700+
4		5500+
5		7300+
6		9100+
7		700+
8		2500+
9		4300+
10		6100+
11		7900+
12		9700+
13		1300+
14		3100+
15		4900+
16		6700+
17		8500+

-- 
Jon Zeeff           		Branch Technology,
uunet!umix!b-tech!zeeff  	zeeff%b-tech.uucp at umix.cc.umich.edu