Re: [PATCH] remove ide-scsi

[Bartlomiej Zolnierkiewicz <bzolnier@gmail.com>]

On Saturday 06 December 2008, Willem Riede wrote:
> On Sat, Dec 6, 2008 at 7:51 AM, Bartlomiej Zolnierkiewicz
> <bzolnier@gmail.com> wrote:
> > 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.).
> >
> Don't know exactly what you mean with "porting osst.c over generic ATAPI code",
> but osst is SCSI by design - a SCSI version of the drive exists.
> Making osst ATAPI

I mean porting it over generic IDE ATAPI code (ide-atapi.c) in case somebody
wants to use it with drivers/ide instead of libata.

> is therefore not appropriate. If osst works with libata as earlier suggested,
> then that would be the best solution.

It should work fine I just doubt that anybody has ever tested it because of
lack of osst users in general.

> Unfortunately, my IDE test drive died, OnStream went out of business some time
> ago, so I can't get a new one, hence I (osst maintainer) can't test this :-(

:-( indeed.

Thanks,
Bart