devsoak

devsoak is a destructive correctness and soak tester for trackdisk-style AmigaOS block device drivers. One run answers two questions:

1. Does every command the driver accepts do the right thing — including the edge cases (bounds, alignment, zero length, the 64-bit offset high word, stale ETD change counts, unsupported commands)?
2. Does it keep doing the right thing for hours while several tasks issue overlapping reads, writes and housekeeping commands, with multiple requests in flight?

It's aimed at driver authors: the primary target is copperhf.device, but devsoak works against any trackdisk-compatible device — scsi.device, lide.device, oktagon.device, uaehf.device, trackdisk.device — so you can compare a driver under test against known-good references.

Relationship to devtest

devsoak complements devtest, it doesn't replace it: devtest probes what a driver accepts and sweeps whole devices, while devsoak works a fixed sector range so it can hold per-sector state and prove content correctness under sustained concurrent load. It borrows devtest's conventions — 0xA5 result-field prefill, 0xA5/0x5A double-read diagnostics, offset-high-word-in-io_Actual for the 64-bit dialects — so findings from either tool read the same way.

Supported platforms

Runs on Kickstart 1.3 and later, and on AROS m68k. 68000-safe. No ixemul, no ReadArgs, no utility.library — see Installation for why that matters for the build.

Destructive by design

devsoak overwrites the range you give it. It refuses to run without both -d and -r, prints the device geometry and the range, and asks for confirmation unless -y is given. It never writes outside the range (the bounds probes included) — but everything inside it is fair game. Never point it at a range you care about.

Quick start

Build it:

make

Run a one-minute characterisation of a driver you don't know yet, in driver-under-test mode:

devsoak lide.device 0 -d -r 512,2K -t 60s -K -y

Or run the smoke profile that CI uses on every commit — 30 seconds of traffic against a scratch range:

ci/smoke.sh test/a1200-scsi.toml scsi.device 0 512,2K

See Understanding a Run for what each profile trades off, and more worked examples.

What you get

• Installation — building with amiga-gcc, what to copy to the Amiga, memory sizing, and a Kickstart 1.3 boot floppy recipe.
• CLI Reference — every option, the exit codes, and the RESULT verdict line CI keys on.
• Understanding a Run — what happens phase by phase, how to read a failure report, pinned behaviours, and run profiles with worked examples.
• The Quirks File — recording known-driver behaviour separately from the driver under test.
• Fingerprinting Drivers — capturing a driver's behavioural identity so a future run can diff against it.
• Testing under Emulation — the Copperline configs, the CI smoke gate, and removable-media testing without real hardware.