I just pulled the "pata-drivers" branch of libata-dev.git into the
"upstream" branch, which means that Alan's libata PATA driver collection
is now queued for 2.6.19.
Testing-wise, these PATA drivers have been Andrew Morton's -mm tree for
many months. Community-wise, no one posted objections to the PATA
driver merge plan, when Alan posted it on LKML and linux-ide.
The following must be in all caps, though:
drivers/ide IS STILL THE PATA DRIVER SET THAT USERS AND DISTROS SHOULD
CHOOSE.
At this time, drivers/ide should not be added to
Documentation/feature-removal-schedule.txt. The libata PATA driver set
should be considered experimental still, and there remains a few
user-visible differences between the two trees:
* Host-protected area (HPA) not ignored in libata, which means disk
sizes differ between drivers/ide (whole disk) and libata (whole disk
minus HPA).
* The obvious change between /dev/hdX to /dev/sdX
* /dev/sdX supports fewer partitions than /dev/hdX (16 versus 64, IIRC)
* /dev/sdX does not support all the HDIO_xxx ioctls that /dev/hdX does.
In practice, the ioctls we ignored are ones that very few people care
about.
* ARM, PPC and other non-x86 platform drivers are severely
under-represented.
As an aside, I would love to see paride updated to use libata, but we
can probably count the number of paride users on one hand these days...
Jeff
--
VGER BF report: U 0.499983
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