Jeff (rightly) thinks the plan should be discussed publically, so here is the plan For 2.6.19 to move the libata drivers to drivers/ata Add a subset of the new PATA drivers living in -mm to the base kernel Many of the new libata drivers are already more stable and functional than the drivers/ide ones. What does this mean for end users selecting the existing IDE layer - Zilch, Nada, Nothing - No changes in behaviour, no different code paths For the more adventurous - Better SATA/PATA integration - Support for some chipsets not supported by drivers/ide (jmicron, newer VIA, mpiix, netcell, efar, etc) - Active maintainance and updates - Better quality drivers and error handling - Inevitably more interesting bugs to find and help fix - A chance to knock out any bugs and assumptions with other platforms The new libata PATA support has some caveats at the moment - No support for certain old serialized devices - No support for prehistoric CMD640 controllers - No support for host-protected-area yet - Drives appear as /dev/sda /dev/sr0 etc along with the libata SATA devices (and since you can't tell SATA from PATA at times its hard to avoid). That means people with some older distros wanting to try it might need to change their fstab or rootdev. People not trying it won't be affected. At this point in time it is premature to discuss or plan the point at which the old IDE layer would go away. That discussion can start at the point where everyone is happy that the new libata based layer is providing better quality and coverage than the old one. Even then there would be no need to hurry. Alan - : send the line "unsubscribe linux-ide" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
