On Fri, May 01, 2009 at 09:14:59AM -0400, Theodore Tso wrote: > Gaah.... so basically a SATA device (the X25-M) is talking to a > SATA-PATA bridge chip, which is then talking the IDE port in the ICH8 > chipset, which shows up as piix, which we're then pretending is SATA > at the OS level via the ata_piix driver. Did I get that right? > (Excuse me while I go find a barf bag....) Well ... libata doesn't pretend that everything is SATA; it uses taskfiles which work for both PATA and SATA. Other than that, I think you've got it right. > Oh.... and I suspect I know why they did it; I'm guessing they wanted > to support PATA Ultrabay devices for backwards compatibility on the > X60, and perhaps they were running out of connector pins on the > docking station (the Ultrabay slot is on the X61's "media slice"), and > they didn't have enough wires to run both PATA and SATA interfaces to > the docking station, *and* they wanted to use the same docking station > for the X60 and X61 Thinkpads. > > Ah, well. I hope it made sense to *someone* at Lenovo... It would be > interesting to see if they fixed this in the X200 or not. Backwards compatibility is a pain. It looks like from this lspci: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/attachment.cgi?id=317327 that the X200 uses ICH9M which doesn't appear to have an IDE port on the chip (document 316972-004). So it must be fixed in the X200 ... unless they've put in a SATA-PATA bridge in the base, and a PATA-SATA bridge in the ultrabay ... Even then, it might work. I don't know enough about the PATA protocol to say. -- 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
