Hello!
There is a bug in 2.5.x kernels (last tested with 2.5.69-bk18) - devfs
entries are not registered for IDE floppies if the media is absent while
the ide-floppy driver is being initialized.
ide-floppy sets the number of minor numbers to more than one in
idefloppy_attach(), drivers/ide/ide-floppy.c and calls add_disk() in
drivers/block/genhd.c, which calls register_disk() in
fs/partitions/check.c.
register_disk() registers devfs entries for devices with one minor number
(e.g. standard PC floppy) and then checks media. If the media is missing,
no devfs entries are registered at all.
I think if would be better to register at least the "disc" entry.
By the way, if ide-floppy is a module, it tries to unregister the devfs
entries on unload, which results is a kernel panic. My earlier patch
posted today to the devfs list prevents the panic and may be useful for
development of ide-floppy until this problem is fixed.
--
Regards,
Pavel Roskin
|