On Sun, 2008-08-03 at 17:39 +0100, Alan Cox wrote: > On Sun, 03 Aug 2008 10:57:35 -0500 > James Bottomley <James.Bottomley@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > > Right at the moment, we have two separate subsystems for running IDE > > type devices: driver/ide and drivers/ata. The claim I've seen is that > > drivers/ata can do everything drivers/ide can do plus it does sata. I > > also note that no major distribution seems to enable anything in > > drivers/ide anymore, so given this is it time to deprecate drivers/ide? > > > > A counter argument to the above is that not all drivers (particularly > > the older ones where hw is scarce) are converted to drivers/ata, so > > That statement would be false. In fact for old and obscure hw the libata > coverage is probably better, not that this in fact is the slighest bit > relevant to the real world! > > The current situation is something like this Hmm, OK, but I did see (as you note below) that mac ide doesn't work with drivers/ata. > - For PC class hardware libata covers everything in old IDE and a lot > more. > - For the older Mac hardware libata does not have pre PCI Macintosh > support although it is in progress > - For certain embedded PPC boards there are some things to sort out with > IRQ routing on non standards sane configurations using pata_ali in > particular. > > There is a trend in new hardware to interfaces that simply won't fit old > IDE so that process of libata only drivers is likely to continue. Yes, that's SATA ... but legacy remains for a long time. > > drivers/ide seems to be needed for some legacy systems (in which case it > > can be deprecated but not removed). I've also noted that some embedded > > distributions seem to be using drivers/ide, but I'm not really sure > > whether this is inertia or some overriding need. > > Actually what a material number of embedded systems need is a single > dumb-as-a-rock CF only PIO driver which doesn't suck in large chunks of > midlayer code. I'm just not sure that trend will continue as CF is giving > way to other smaller media. Yes, I understand this ... if that means drivers/ata can't possibly be used by embedded until its dependence on SCSI is broken, then so be it ... but I think we should at least investigate what the issues and potential solutions are. > > The proposal is to discuss the future of these two subsystems and arrive > > at a consensus what's happening to each going forwards. > > Won't be at KS and I suspect that is true of most of the folks hacking on > both sets so the right place for discussion would be the net. Right now > the PPC bits need fixing, and the lack of libata Macio support for the > moment makes the debate premature. Well, I did notice from the lists that both drivers/ide and drivers/ata would be represented. I've also observed that there's been a singular lack of discussion of this on the lists; plus it's the type of emotive issue that in-person discussions help to extract the heat from. James -- To unsubscribe from this list: 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
