ked@garnet.berkeley.edu (Earl H. Kinmonth) (02/14/89)
I am running SCO Xenix 2.2 on an ATT 6310 (Olivetti AT). Both home brew and system programs that try io operations to any of the /dev/fd (not /dev/rfd) device files lock the system if there is some error on the device (write protect, door open, bad floppy), etc. When I say errors lock the system, I mean they lock the system. A kill -9 is ignored, pulling the plug on the drive, etc. do nothing. I just get a stream of device errors. Is this "normal" behavior in the sense that it is a general bug, or is it one specific to my configuration? Does anyone have a work around? When this problem occurs, this is no error return from the associated read() or write(). Using O_SYNCW with open() seems to result in a proper error return but also seems to result in slower io operations.