Support for the PATA port in sata_promise

Support for the PATA port in sata_promise

[Simon Raffeiner]

Hello,

I've got an Asus A8V Deluxe Mainboard with an onboard Promise SATA 378
(PDC20378) controller. Because four PATA ports are never enough one of my hard
disks is connected to the PATA port of the Promise chip. I use Ubuntu Linux
5.04 (Hoary) and after upgrading to kernel 2.6.11 the port stopped working. It
seems that Ubuntu kernel 2.6.10 contains a version of the sata_promise driver
that features PATA support, but later that patch was dropped and also vanilla
kernels up to 2.6.12.3 don't feature it.

Some other distributions seem to include a PATA-enabled version, but when will
support for the PATA port be included in vanilla kernels? The version Ubuntu
kernel 2.6.10 uses works fine. Unfortunately it is not compatible with newer
vanilla kernels.

Regards,

Simon Raffeiner

Re: Support for the PATA port in sata_promise

[Lukasz Kosewski]

On 7/24/05, Simon Raffeiner <sturmflut@lieberbiber.de> wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I've got an Asus A8V Deluxe Mainboard with an onboard Promise SATA 378
> (PDC20378) controller. Because four PATA ports are never enough one of my hard
> disks is connected to the PATA port of the Promise chip. I use Ubuntu Linux
> 5.04 (Hoary) and after upgrading to kernel 2.6.11 the port stopped working. It
> seems that Ubuntu kernel 2.6.10 contains a version of the sata_promise driver
> that features PATA support, but later that patch was dropped and also vanilla
> kernels up to 2.6.12.3 don't feature it.

If you want to use 2.6.11 (for stability?  Nostalgia?), check out the
2.6.11-libata-dev1 patch
(http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/jgarzik/libata/2.6.11-libata-dev1.patch.bz2),
which added the PATA support.  If you don't mind testing the latest
and greatest, try Andrew Morton's -mm patch to the 2.6.13-rc3 kernel,
which also has the patch.  If you check the 'broken-out' patches which
Andrew has, you can grab just the patch itself and modify it to
whatever kernel you want to apply it to, but unless you know what
you're doing I wouldn't recommend that route.

> Some other distributions seem to include a PATA-enabled version, but when will
> support for the PATA port be included in vanilla kernels? The version Ubuntu
> kernel 2.6.10 uses works fine. Unfortunately it is not compatible with newer
> vanilla kernels.

I guess that depends on when it's deemed stable, but I guess either
2.6.13 or 2.6.14.

Cheers,

Luke Kosewski
Human Cannonball
Net Integration Technologies