Re: Merging ATA passthru

[Jeff Garzik <jgarzik@pobox.com>]

Mark Lord wrote:
> Jeff Garzik wrote:
> 
>>
>> Folks,
>>
>> Taking Mark Lord's (and others) criticism to heart, I'm going to merge 
>> the ATA passthru work upstream, once 2.6.14 is released.
> 
> 
> Thanks, Jeff!
> 
>> Since there are still some reported problems that I haven't had time 
>> to track down, I'm going to -- like ATAPI -- introduce a module option 
>> that enables passthru.  It will default to off.
> 
> 
> With passthru, it would really be much better to just leave it enabled
> without any option.  It's NOT on any main code path, and users/distros
> have to intentionally run "smartctl -d ata" or "hdparm /dev/sd*" to
> trigger any of it.
> 
> So it is already "off", unless somebody wants to use it.

Not really true, as people constantly try (and fail) to use hdparm with 
their SATA disks today.

Anyway, I have this weird thing about not turning on something by 
default, when I know has it problems ;-)

	Jeff