Re: Kernel Summit request for Discussion of future of ATA (libata) and IDE

["Rafael J. Wysocki" <rjw@sisk.pl>]

On Sunday, 3 of August 2008, Willy Tarreau wrote:
> On Sun, Aug 03, 2008 at 05:39:41PM +0100, Alan Cox wrote:
> > Actually what a material number of embedded systems need is a single
> > dumb-as-a-rock CF only PIO driver which doesn't suck in large chunks of
> > midlayer code. I'm just not sure that trend will continue as CF is giving
> > way to other smaller media.
> 
> I bet we'll see CF for a long time, because it is the only cheap
> removable media to support IDE emulation and be bootable from an
> unmodified PC BIOS. SD is cheaper and will soon provide larger
> capacities, but it still requires a separate controller and is
> not bootable with standard BIOSes.
> 
> Anyway, in my experience, libata supports CF on embedded controllers
> pretty well. So maybe we should start marking IDE drivers deprecated
> to encourage people to try libata instead and report breakage if any.

Well, I know of at least one case of PC hardware in which an old IDE driver
basically works while the libata/pata poeple have no idea why their driver
doesn't:

http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=9157

Thanks,
Rafael