From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Matthew Wilcox Subject: Re: No NCQ support on X61s Ultrabay? (Intel ICH8 SATA controller question) Date: Fri, 1 May 2009 07:09:14 -0700 Message-ID: <20090501140914.GD10704@linux.intel.com> References: <49F90CA2.4080602@garzik.org> <20090430083309.437f9248@lithium.local.net> <20090430113445.GA4809@mit.edu> <20090430113814.GB4809@mit.edu> <49FA55A0.8080303@gmail.com> <20090501025132.GA7275@mit.edu> <49FA78B4.2070900@gmail.com> <20090501113533.GB10704@linux.intel.com> <20090501131459.GA7681@mit.edu> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Return-path: Received: from mga05.intel.com ([192.55.52.89]:50091 "EHLO fmsmga101.fm.intel.com" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-FAIL) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1751223AbZEAOJP (ORCPT ); Fri, 1 May 2009 10:09:15 -0400 Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <20090501131459.GA7681@mit.edu> Sender: linux-ide-owner@vger.kernel.org List-Id: linux-ide@vger.kernel.org To: Theodore Tso , Robert Hancock , Alex Buell , Jeff Garzik , linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, Linux On Fri, May 01, 2009 at 09:14:59AM -0400, Theodore Tso wrote: > Gaah.... so basically a SATA device (the X25-M) is talking to a > SATA-PATA bridge chip, which is then talking the IDE port in the ICH8 > chipset, which shows up as piix, which we're then pretending is SATA > at the OS level via the ata_piix driver. Did I get that right? > (Excuse me while I go find a barf bag....) Well ... libata doesn't pretend that everything is SATA; it uses taskfiles which work for both PATA and SATA. Other than that, I think you've got it right. > Oh.... and I suspect I know why they did it; I'm guessing they wanted > to support PATA Ultrabay devices for backwards compatibility on the > X60, and perhaps they were running out of connector pins on the > docking station (the Ultrabay slot is on the X61's "media slice"), and > they didn't have enough wires to run both PATA and SATA interfaces to > the docking station, *and* they wanted to use the same docking station > for the X60 and X61 Thinkpads. > > Ah, well. I hope it made sense to *someone* at Lenovo... It would be > interesting to see if they fixed this in the X200 or not. Backwards compatibility is a pain. It looks like from this lspci: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/attachment.cgi?id=317327 that the X200 uses ICH9M which doesn't appear to have an IDE port on the chip (document 316972-004). So it must be fixed in the X200 ... unless they've put in a SATA-PATA bridge in the base, and a PATA-SATA bridge in the ultrabay ... Even then, it might work. I don't know enough about the PATA protocol to say.