On 9/5/06, Siddharth Taneja <siddharth.taneja@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Hi, I have two SATA drives with an ICH6 SATA controller. I would like to know that if I were to operate the drives in PATA mode, what would happen if I enabled both ide/ata-piix and scsi/piix. I assume the drives would come up as both hda/hdb and sda/sdb. Is there a recommendation as to which device (or interface) to use? Also I set the bios settings for the SATA controller to AHCI and the ide/ata-piix driver is still able to bring up the drives as hde/hdg. Why is that? Shouldn't the ide/ata-piix realise that this is not a mode it supports? Thanks Siddharth
Siddharth, I don't know the specific answers, but this whole area is in a state of flux. 2.6.16 likely behaves different from 2.6.17, which is different from 2.6.18, which will be different from 2.6.19. First, when multiple drivers are available for a single disk controller, only one of them should be used. Using 2 or more can cause huge conflicts that could easily destroy data. Most of the drivers are specifically written to avoid the issue. The first driver that recognizes a disk controller claims the controller and no other driver can claim it. In dual functionality controller like the ICH6, I believe the 2 halves are claimed seperately. ie. The PATA half can be controlled by drivers/ide and the SATA half can be controlled by drivers/libata. That can be difficult to make work smoothly, so there is an ongoing effort to do the below: 2.6.18 - Greatly improved libata (SATA currently) Error Handling 2.6.19 - Rename drivers/libata to drivers/ata as it is becoming the main ATA driver 2.6.19 - Add initial support for PATA drives to libata Thus when 2.6.19 comes out in a few months it will hopefully have the ability to better handle these dual function controllers. It still may require proper setup of config due to there still being multiple drivers that support the same card. HTH Greg -- Greg Freemyer The Norcross Group Forensics for the 21st Century -- Kernelnewbies: Help each other learn about the Linux kernel. Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/kernelnewbies/ FAQ: http://kernelnewbies.org/faq/
