From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: James Bottomley Subject: Kernel Summit request for Discussion of future of ATA (libata) and IDE Date: Sun, 03 Aug 2008 10:57:35 -0500 Message-ID: <1217779055.4179.10.camel@localhost.localdomain> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Return-path: Received: from accolon.hansenpartnership.com ([76.243.235.52]:60775 "EHLO accolon.hansenpartnership.com" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1756243AbYHCP5m (ORCPT ); Sun, 3 Aug 2008 11:57:42 -0400 Sender: linux-ide-owner@vger.kernel.org List-Id: linux-ide@vger.kernel.org To: ksummit-2008-discuss@lists.linux-foundation.org, linux-kernel , linux-ide Right at the moment, we have two separate subsystems for running IDE type devices: driver/ide and drivers/ata. The claim I've seen is that drivers/ata can do everything drivers/ide can do plus it does sata. I also note that no major distribution seems to enable anything in drivers/ide anymore, so given this is it time to deprecate drivers/ide? A counter argument to the above is that not all drivers (particularly the older ones where hw is scarce) are converted to drivers/ata, so drivers/ide seems to be needed for some legacy systems (in which case it can be deprecated but not removed). I've also noted that some embedded distributions seem to be using drivers/ide, but I'm not really sure whether this is inertia or some overriding need. The proposal is to discuss the future of these two subsystems and arrive at a consensus what's happening to each going forwards. James