[ale] Auto-mount floppy in Fedora

[Matthew Magee]

James P. Kinney III wrote:

>On Mon, 2004-07-19 at 20:09, Matthew Magee wrote:
>
>  
>
>>According to my A+ book, pin 34 on a floppy drive signals 
>>insertion/ejection of a disk, so the mechanism appears to be there.  On 
>>my Mandrake 9.2 system I can insert/eject a floppy at will.  Does not 
>>open a Konqueror window though.  Still have to do that myself.
>>    
>>
>
>Yep. There in theory only. Since the floppy drive was invented during
>the DOS era (error?) and MS-DOS never supported a way to auto-check it
>was never actually used.
>
>That said, it may be time to grab a floppy and do some cable prodding to
>see if pin 34 really does change state on insertion.
>
>A box of AOL CD's says it won't. :) Unless the tester swiped the drive
>from a Mac (that would be cheating and the cheater would be required to
>_take_ a box of AOL CD's)
>
>  
>
 From The Linux Kernel Archive:   
http://www.uwsg.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0110.2/0900.html

Andreas Dilger writes:
/>In the case of a floppy drive, this is very important, as you don't /
/>want to be cacheing data from one floppy after you have inserted a new /
/>floppy. /

Actually, the floppy drive is able to detect disk changes just fine,
and since 1.0's the disk change signal (DCL) has been used to trigger
cache flushing.

Bill Davidsen wrote:
/>That said, I have a few other thoughts. First, can't the kernel /
/>detect when a new floppy is inserted? /

Yes, the kernel (floppy driver) can do this, and indeed it does.

/>I can't remember if there is an /
/>interupt generated when the floppy seats or not. /

Actually, it is not really an interrupt, but a bit that is set in the
FD_DIR register. It stays set until the floppy disk driver
acknowledges it by seeking the drive, or by selecting/unselecting it.

Before reading from the disk (or whenever it needs to know whether a
disk has been changed or not), the floppy driver reads this bit, and
if set notifies the VFS of the disk change. It then proceeds to seek,
in order to clear this flag (needed in order to detect further
changes)