Re: IDE ioctl documentation & a new ioctl

[Jim Nelson <james4765@verizon.net>]

Edward Falk wrote:
> Hi all; let me introduce myself:  I'm the guy that does IDE sustaining 
> for Google.
> 
> I'm getting ready to sit down and document the IDE ioctls.  Probably 
> Documentation/hdio.txt or something like that.  Before I start though, 
> is anybody already doing this?
> 

No one that I know of.  I had a thought in the back of my head of tackling ioctl 
documentation after I went through the stuff that's already in Documentation, but 
I figured I had enough to chew on for right now.

I'd probably make a subdirectory - i. e. Documentation/ioctl/hdio.txt - to 
differentiate it from other documents, and make it easier to get maintainers to 
put some stuff in there. ;)   AFAICT, there is next to no documentation on ioctl's 
anywhere in the kernel tarball.

> And while I'm on the subject, we're getting ready to write a new hdio 
> ioctl, an extension of HDIO_DRIVE_CMD.  The intent here is to be 
> slightly more general-purpose than HDIO_DRIVE_CMD, with an eye to 
> supporting the full set of SMART functionality.  Current plan is to have 
> the user pass a struct containing a pointer to the argument list, a 
> pointer to the data buffer, and a data buffer length value.  Consider 
> this a design document; any comments and/or feature requests?
> 
>     -ed falk
>     efalk@google.com
> -