inet4.xdd blocks floppy formatting

[mikrosk]

I saw a bug report + workaround about this in our local Czech/Slovak mailing list. Apparently if you have inet4.xdd active, floppy formatting under FreeMiNT doesn't work.

Teradesk says "floppy device can not be locked for xbios operations", Kobold/E-COPY says that the floppy drive is used by another application.

I don't have a floppy drive in my Falcon for a long time so I can't test, can someone?

[DavidGZ]

I've just tested it and I confirm that formatting a floppy in Teradesk and Kobold doens't work when inet4.xdd is loaded.

[skaftetryne]

This has been a problem for 15 years or more. When I looked into this years ago it turned out that it was syslogd that held a lock on the floppy. Killing syslogd allowed me to format the floppy. Apparently Alan tried to fix this back in 2011:

https://mikro.naprvyraz.sk/mint/201107/threads.html#00296

I'm sure I wrote about my findings on the MiNT-list, but I could not find that thread.

[mikrosk]

Oh yes, it's an old one. The mentioned file can be found here: https://mikro.naprvyraz.sk/gentoo.atariforge.org/files/app-admin/sysklogd-1.5.tbz2 but it's not so much help even if it work because @atic-atac hasn't provided any source code to his gentoo packages...

[skaftetryne]

mikrosk, what was the suggested workaround you mention? Booting with no inetd.xdd?

IIRC I investigated this problem sometime around 2010 after a bug report by Peter Slegg. Dlock() said that syslogd held a lock on the floppy device. Killing syslogd allowed formatting from Thing! under XaAES/MiNT. It was a bit strange, as the floppy was otherwise working normally. I would assume that if it really was locked it would not be possible to access it, as Dlock would prevent GEMDOS operations on that device.

[mikrosk]

what was the suggested workaround you mention? Booting with no inetd.xdd?

Yes. I have asked the guy to try to kill syslogd and/or the new sysklogd archive to see whether it helps in his case.

[skaftetryne]

If you don't enable inetd.xdd syslogd will not start as socket functionality is missing. However, I'm not sure if syslogd is the root of the problem here. Floppy behaviour is odd - as I said it should not be possible to access the floppy drive at all when a process has Dlock-ed it (after all, the purpose is to lock the drive for GEMDOS access when a process is doing low level access) but you can read and write files/directories.

[mikrosk]

Of course, the idea was to kill/replace syslogd with inetd.xdd enabled. And I agree, something strange is going on. Maybe it's reproducible in Aranym, too? That would help with debugging.

[mikrosk]

I wanted to give it a try under Hatari and Aranym but no luck, it seems that floppy formatting isn't very good in those emulators. So @DavidGZ, if you feel like looking into it, go ahead.

[skaftetryne]

I just tested on my Falcon/CT60e which is running a 1.19 from 2017. It runs a plain GEM-focused setup so no inetd or syslogd, but inetd.xdd is loaded and network set up with dhclient. I was allowed to format a floppy from Teradesk without issues.

[skaftetryne]

@mikrosk, it's not necessary to actually format a disk to test this. If you get as far as (attempting to) format the problem in question is not present. From what I can see the problem is that Dlock say that the floppy is already locked, which is why Teradesk/Thing!/whatever formatter throws an error and refuses to format.

[mikrosk]

@skaftetryne the guy confirmed that his 1.19 from April 2018 doesn't work. Can you try current snapshot on your Falcon? (I asked him the opposite, to try your VanillaMiNT from 2017).

[skaftetryne]

Not now, I'm in the middle of a complete kitchen renovation and have way too little time for playing I'm afraid. Maybe this weekend, I'm hoping to take a few hours off then.

[skaftetryne]

Btw did that guy test by killing syslogd, or by not starting it in the first place? I assume he's using EasyMiNT, he should try to not run init but start XaAES directly and then test.

[DavidGZ]

I've done some more tests, syslogd seems to have no influence in this problem, with the version 1.5 linked above the problem persists, and even it's still there with no syslogd running.
If I run xaaes directly from mint.cnf instead of init, then I'm able to format.
All this with current kernel.

[mikrosk]

OK so if I understand your and Jo's description correctly, inet4.xdd can be loaded but you have to start xaloader instead of /sbin/init? I guess /sbin/init somehow messes with logging and leads to this situation. That would explain all the confusing reports over the years, it worked for some (like Jo) while it never worked for someone else (like the Czech guy using /sbin/init).