Re: libata and PATA devices

[Erik Slagter <erik@slagter.name>]

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On Thu, 2005-08-11 at 12:03 +0200, Bartlomiej Zolnierkiewicz wrote:
> > > > Most current laptops ship with a PATA hard drive, and a PATA
> > > > ATAPI drive.  The easiest way to make them usable under Linux-2.6
> 
> New laptops rather ship with:
> 
> SATA (or PATA + bridge) hard disk and PATA ATAPI drive

How do I find out?

As ICH6M features both PATA and SATA connections, I don't see why they'd
use a PATA bridge... The DVD drives use PATA anyway, btw.

> > You are sort of contradicting yourself. My setup (Dell laptop with ICH6M
> > and PATA harddisk) defaults to using libata for the PATA hardisk. Only

> Are you sure?

Yes I am sure. I can give you all the data to verify it yourself.

> I suspect that you have SATA-PATA converter inside the laptop

That would be a possibility, but I don't why.

> (or you are simply not using vanilla kernel).

You bet I always use vanilla kernels.

> > with a specific patch (which adds the PCI id to the IDE driver's id
> > list, and which was not quite accepted here) the IDE driver will
> > recognise the ICH6M and use it (and then it works fine).
> 
> Yes, current situation with ICH6M support really sucks as many laptops
> are set to use combined mode and don't have BIOS option to disable it

Yeah, grmbl.

> so users end up with unusable ATAPI device (== limited to PIO mode
> only because DMA region is already reserved by libata and cannot be
> used by IDE driver).

But with the patch (that adds the ID to the IDE driver), it all works.

> OTOH IDE driver should handle combined mode just fine and provide 
> working ATAPI DMA (+ SMART support for HDD).  I prefer to not go
> this way but the libata development is *extremely* slow (I'm not blaming
> anyone just stating the fact)...

I guess you have a quite bunch of users willing to test here ;-)

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