Re: Additions to libata patch archive

[Edward Falk <efalk@google.com>]

> In case anyone should care, the original SiImage driver oopses during
> boot with recent kernels.
> 
> The reason I know this is that I just tried booting 2.6.14-rc3 with the
> 0.10 (SiImage) driver.  It appears to contain port multiplier support,
> which I need.  Tejun's rewrite doesn't, and SiImage wants me to sign an
> NDA to get a more recent driver of theirs that has port multiplier
> support.

The original vendor-supplied driver did not support port multipliers, 
but it had the hooks that implied they were thinking about it.  The 
original driver had a number of problems, mostly dealing with lack of 
error recovery as you have just discovered.

Tejun's driver is much better, and I have sent him some patches that 
will make it quite stable.


There are two approaches to port multiplier support -- one is to add it 
to the driver (a real kludge) or to add it to libata.  Kludging it into 
the driver is a quick-and-dirty solution, while adding it to libata will 
take more time.  I'm trying to find the time to do the latter.

	-ed falk