ICH6M legacy hotswap?

ICH6M legacy hotswap?

[Shem Multinymous]

Hi,

Is there currently any kludge/patch/hack for hot/warm/cold swapping on
the PATA port of ICH6M in legacy mode with ata_piix/libata? Or a way
to switch the ICH6M to AHCI mode (in the absence of BIOS support) and
then get AHCI hot/warm/coldwap?

I'm trying to get hot-swapping of the UltraBay DVD drive on a ThinkPad T43.

(There's a new kernel module, lt_hotswap, that provides IDE
hotswapping on some PATA machines, such as older ThinkPads. It fiddles
with ACPI and the legacy ide driver's internals, so it doesn't work
with the ata_piix driver needed on the ThinkPad T43.)

  Shem

Re: [ltp] ICH6M legacy hotswap?

[Shem Multinymous]

On 2/28/06, Jim Duchek <jim.duchek@gmail.com> wrote:
> I think if you can get AHCI working, I can get lt_hotswap working with it.

I tried switching this box from the ata_piix driver to the ahci
driver. The ahci driver recognizes the ICH6M chip (it's on the
whitelist of both drivers), but probing fails with error -12 
(-ENOMEM?! Does this make sense?).

Anyway, the ICH6M is not initialized to AHCI mode by the BIOS (at
least as judged by at ata_piix, since when using ata_piix,
piix_disable_ahci() isn't called).

  Shem

Re: [ltp] ICH6M legacy hotswap?

[Shem Multinymous]

On 2/28/06, Jim Duchek <jim.duchek@gmail.com> wrote:
> On 28/02/06, Shem Multinymous <multinymous@gmail.com> wrote:
> > On 2/28/06, Jim Duchek <jim.duchek@gmail.com> wrote:
> > I tried switching this box from the ata_piix driver to the ahci
> > driver. The ahci driver recognizes the ICH6M chip (it's on the
> > whitelist of both drivers), but probing fails with error -12
> > (-ENOMEM?! Does this make sense?).
> >
> > Anyway, the ICH6M is not initialized to AHCI mode by the BIOS (at
> > least as judged by at ata_piix, since when using ata_piix,
> > piix_disable_ahci() isn't called).
>
> Hrm. I've seen a lot of traffic in that driver for the release candidates of
> 2.6.16 -- perhaps you'll have better luck when .16 comes out.

With 2.6.16-rc5-git2, ahci's probing still fails with error -12.

  Shem

Re: [ltp] ICH6M legacy hotswap?

[Matthew Garrett]

On Tue, Feb 28, 2006 at 11:35:45AM +0200, Shem Multinymous wrote:

> Is there currently any kludge/patch/hack for hot/warm/cold swapping on
> the PATA port of ICH6M in legacy mode with ata_piix/libata? Or a way
> to switch the ICH6M to AHCI mode (in the absence of BIOS support) and
> then get AHCI hot/warm/coldwap?

To the best of my knowledge, there is no way to get an ICH6 into AHCI 
mode if the BIOS has set it up in legacy mode. I wrote some code that 
basically does what lt_hotswap does for SATA devices that worked fine on 
my ICH6 test machine (a Dell rather than a Thinkpad, but shouldn't 
matter in this case), but it needs much more polish before it's 
integratable.

-- 
Matthew Garrett | mjg59@srcf.ucam.org

Re: [ltp] ICH6M legacy hotswap?

[Shem Multinymous]

On 2/28/06, Matthew Garrett <mjg59@srcf.ucam.org> wrote:
> To the best of my knowledge, there is no way to get an ICH6 into AHCI
> mode if the BIOS has set it up in legacy mode.

Yeah, I've just found Jeff's posts on that.
It's a real shame, taking a perfectly good AHCI controller and using
it in legacy mode... I hope someone finds a way to hack it out.


> I wrote some code that
> basically does what lt_hotswap does for SATA devices that worked fine on
> my ICH6 test machine (a Dell rather than a Thinkpad, but shouldn't
> matter in this case), but it needs much more polish before it's
> integratable.

Eagerly awaited.

  Shem