I'm using gmail's interface (I don't have access to my laptop ATM) so the mail may look a bit weird... On Sun, Aug 3, 2008 at 5:57 PM, 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 This claim doesn't seem to have confirmation in facts: * There is still hardware that is simply not-supported by libata at all: - architecture specific hardware (ppc, m68k, mips, arm) - "difficult" legacy PC-class hardware (i.e. secondary interface on CY82C693 etc) * There are still regressions in many libata PCI host drivers dating back to their rushed introduction. * There are still corner case in libata core - PIO is dead slow compared to drivers/ide/, "serialized" hosts are not supported, some quirks for obsolete hardware got lost... > also note that no major distribution seems to enable anything in > drivers/ide anymore, so given this is it time to deprecate drivers/ide? Major distributions make their own decisions (I don't remeber anybody from these distros discussing the conversion on linux-kernel or linux-ide) which sometimes don't match with what kernel.org kernels are doing. [ Actually one distro went so far as CONFIG_IDE=n even before support for all PC-class IDE PCI hardware present in drivers/ide was available in libata. ] Also the same major distros that use libata on x86 are using drivers/ide on non-x86. > 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 > 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. drivers/ide deprecation would be a premature thing. > The proposal is to discuss the future of these two subsystems and arrive > at a consensus what's happening to each going forwards. Well, I'm looking forward to discuss the future of Linux ATA support. Thanks, Bart -- 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
