🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Aug31.214211.20267@midway.uchicago.edu> pynq@midway.uchicago.edu writes:
>In article <1992Aug31.183957.1391@mits.mdata.fi> kennu@mits.mdata.fi (Kenneth Falck) writes:
>>Of course you can trash your hard disk if you boot prematurely,
>>but it has nothing to do with whether you do it by jumping
>>to FFFF:0000 or pressing Ctrl-Alt-Del or the Reset button.
>
>How long ago was it that we were hashing this one out before?
>
>(As in, is it just  my imagination or has the recycle rate gone ski-high
>in just that last few weeks?)

I don't know, I haven't been following the traffic 100% constantly,
though I remember some discussion about Smartdrive.

>Anyway, for the record, it makes all the difference in the world whether
>you use JMP FFFF:0 or emulate C/A/D, if you are using a write-behind cache.
>
>Some people think this is a bug in SmartDrive...  (If you don't get
>this, you really haven't been paying attention!)

Well, I suppose the major difference is that Smartdrive probably captures
IRQ1 and checks for Ctrl-Alt-Del before continuing with the keyboard
interrupt, and cannot check for a jump to FFFF:0000. (I wonder can it
be done, by the way, by placing some odd statement in FFFF:0000....
I've never checked out what that address really contains anyway.)

But anyway, my point was meant to be that nobody should reboot the
computer before making sure all buffers have been flushed, no matter
who does the flushing. (Smartdrive after a timeout or the user by
pressing a key combination or running a "sync" command.) It just
seemed strange to flame someone who posts a reboot.com program
because this program could be "dangerous" or something. (Unless
I misunderstood that posting.)

>Anyway, somebody ought to get Ralf to post the one true solution to the
>auto-reboot program.

Hmm... sounds like something my religion teacher might say... (Yes,
religion is compulsory at school in Finland.) But anyway, if someone
wants to reboot from a batch file, why not just first ask the user
to press a key to signal that he has flushed the cache buffers,
and then reboot freely?

Unfortunately I just don't remember what exactly was the original
purpose of this rebooting from a batch file ... Just wanted to
add my opinion on auto-rebooting in general.

Actually, in this age of background-writing caches, the next MSDOS
release should probably contain a "flush cache buffers" interrupt
service which could become a standard point for all different
caching software to check for a call to flush. (Though I doubt
that even Microsoft's own software would reliably support it....:-)

-- 
kennu@mits.mdata.fi