Re: Linux 2.6.20-rc1

[Jeff Garzik <jeff@garzik.org>]

Linus Torvalds wrote:
> 
> On Thu, 14 Dec 2006, Alistair John Strachan wrote:
>> `hddtemp' has stopped working on 2.6.20-rc1:
> 
> Hmm. Can you do the strace on a working kernel too? For example, is it 
> that the 0x30d ioctl (which is HDIO_GET_IDENTITY) used to work? If it's a 
> SATA device, and you _used_ to use the PATA drivers, some of the old 
> IDE-only ioctl's simply don't work when used in native SATA 
> configurations.
> 
> [ Side note: I consider that to be a mis-feature, but it's not a new 
>   regression, it's always been that way: different block subsystems have 
>   had their own "private" ioctl spaces.
> 
>   We've been moving more and more towards a unified space, and we could 
>   probably make scsi_ioctl.c emulate at least _some_ of the HDIO_xxx calls 
>   too, and try to support all the block ioctl's on all block devices 
>   rather than have some that work only on some certain class of hardware. 

FWIW, libata generally follows a "implement it, if enough people care 
about it" policy for the old HDIO_xxx ioctls.

There are plenty of HDIO_xxx ioctl should that have died back in the 
days when people using the 'hd' driver rather than the newfangled IDE 
driver.

So this change sorta filters out a lot of those older ioctls.

hddtemp is open source and reasonably well known, so I would certainly 
like to support it, if its reasonable.  For ATA disks, obtaining the 
temperature sometimes requires vendor-specific or firmware-specific 
knowledge.  hddtemp centralizes all that info in a database.

	Jeff