Re: [PATCH] remove ide-scsi

[Bartlomiej Zolnierkiewicz <bzolnier@gmail.com>]

On Wednesday 03 December 2008, James Bottomley wrote:
> On Wed, 2008-12-03 at 05:06 -0500, Christoph Hellwig wrote:
> > On Wed, Dec 03, 2008 at 10:38:54AM +0900, FUJITA Tomonori wrote:
> > > This is for 2.6.29 (not 2.6.28) as feature-removal-schedule.txt says.
> > > 
> > > It's against linux-next (which seems to has some changes to ide-scsi
> > > for 2.6.29 from the ide tree). 
> > 
> > Isn't ide-scsi the only way to use ATAPI OnStream tapes supported by
> > the osst driver?
> 
> Depends.  If you're still using drivers/ide then yes, it is.  With
> libata (which is what most modern distros use), osst just works as an
> ATAPI transport.
> 
> git log tells me ide-scsi has been updated quite a bit recently, but it
> mostly looks to be fallout around the drivers/ide churn.  Can we get ide
> maintainer's buy in for this (I think they've been maintaining ide-tape
> and ide-cd in preference to ide-scsi)?

Certainly, native ide-{cd,gd,tape} drivers are far superior over ide-scsi
and are actively maintained.

ide-scsi has been practically a dead code for a long time now (IIRC it has
even been broken -- by some general kernel changes -- for few releases and
nobody noticed, till Boaz discovered it while doing unrelated SCSI fixes)
but I kept it on the live support anyway.  However there needs to be some
limit to it, especially given that driver has been officially orphaned for
over a year now and nobody stepped in...

I applied the scheduled removal patch to pata-2.6 tree, thanks Tomo!

Thanks,
Bart

PS If somebody wants to work on OSST support for IDE we can provide an
assistance into porting osst.c over generic ATAPI code -- it would still
be much less hassle than trying to figure out remaining ide-scsi issues
(lifetime rules for IDE / SCSI / IDE-SCSI objects, error handling etc.).