[Coco] Sugestions for new NitrOS-9 versions

[Aaron Wolfe]

On Apr 2, 2014 12:26 PM, "L. Curtis Boyle" <curtisboyle at sasktel.net> wrote:
>
> Some of the hard drive drivers do sector 0 caching already (since they
know they are hard drives, and don't have to worry about swapping disks),
like the B&B and the Eliminator.
>

I remember that being mentioned when I asked about it a while back.  Some
tests with DriveWire show that it certainty does improve overall system
speed a lot for such a simple thing, so not surprised this was an
optimization added in specific drivers.

Is concern over disk changes the only reason RBF reads it so often in the
first place?  I'm wondering if there is a universal way to address this or
if individual drivers is the best approach.  Most modern drive types
(emulator FDD and hard drives, DriveWire, ide/cf/sd card hdd systems, etc)
can easily know when a disk has changed (or that it will never change) and
indicate this to RBF much more efficiently than polling sector 0.
Wondering if there might be an even simpler way to achieve the same
improvement by setting a flag in the DD that RBF knows means "this disk
isn't going to change" or something like that.