Hello, Ever since I put out the docking station patches people have been asking me if I could get removable drive bays to work as well. These are devices such as the IBM/Lenovo Ultrabay, or the Dell Module Bay - basically removable disk drives. There is an IBM platform specific solution that works with some IBM laptops, but nothing generic. In addition, the ibm_acpi driver had the limitation that it would not correctly identify ultrabay devices that had been inserted after the OS booted. This driver implements bay handling using ACPI to safely power off the drive. It works similarly to the ibm_acpi driver, in that it will simply generate an acpi event which can then be used by udev to unmount or rescan depending on the event. It will create a proc entry under /proc/acpi/bay for "eject" and for "status". Writing a 1 to the eject call will cause the drive bays acpi eject method to be called, and should be done prior to removing the device. Reading the "status" entry will tell you either "present" or "removed" depending on the state of the device. User space scripts can use the status entry to determine if a device has been either inserted or removed in the case of some laptops who generate the exact same event for either insertion or removal (i.e. the Dell M65 for example). Same scripts for using these events and udev can be found on the thinkwiki website: http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/How_to_hotswap_UltraBay_devices#When_using_the_ata _piix_driver Note that due to the lack of hotplug PATA, this driver will only work with SATA devices, or with ata_piix driver. Hopefully if/when hotplug PATA support gets into libata, we can support that as well. Note that this driver does not have the same limitations that the ibm_acpi driver had with regard to device insertion after booting. i.e. - if you boot the laptop without a drive bay inserted, and then insert the drive bay later on, this driver will still detect the insertion and send an event to user space. The bay driver will also register with the dock station driver so that if the removeable drive bay is on a dock station, an event will be sent to userspace upon dock/undock that will allow any udev scripts specifically for bay handling to still be executed. The driver still needs more testing, and I still have a little bit of funkiness to sort out with the Lenovo X60 with the SATA controller in compatibility mode - but I think it is ready for you to experiment with if you like and I hope that you will give it a try and send me any feedback you have. patch 1 is just a bug fix to the dock driver that will allow devices who's parents are listed as being on the dock to also be recognized as being on a dock station. patch 2 is the driver. Thanks, Kristen - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-acpi" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
