From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Jeff Garzik Subject: PATA drivers queued for 2.6.19 Date: Mon, 04 Sep 2006 07:01:13 -0400 Message-ID: <44FC0779.9030405@garzik.org> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Return-path: Received: from srv5.dvmed.net ([207.36.208.214]:2944 "EHLO mail.dvmed.net") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1751395AbWIDLBP (ORCPT ); Mon, 4 Sep 2006 07:01:15 -0400 Sender: linux-ide-owner@vger.kernel.org List-Id: linux-ide@vger.kernel.org To: "linux-ide@vger.kernel.org" Cc: Linux Kernel , Alan Cox , Andrew Morton , Linus Torvalds I just pulled the "pata-drivers" branch of libata-dev.git into the "upstream" branch, which means that Alan's libata PATA driver collection is now queued for 2.6.19. Testing-wise, these PATA drivers have been Andrew Morton's -mm tree for many months. Community-wise, no one posted objections to the PATA driver merge plan, when Alan posted it on LKML and linux-ide. The following must be in all caps, though: drivers/ide IS STILL THE PATA DRIVER SET THAT USERS AND DISTROS SHOULD CHOOSE. At this time, drivers/ide should not be added to Documentation/feature-removal-schedule.txt. The libata PATA driver set should be considered experimental still, and there remains a few user-visible differences between the two trees: * Host-protected area (HPA) not ignored in libata, which means disk sizes differ between drivers/ide (whole disk) and libata (whole disk minus HPA). * The obvious change between /dev/hdX to /dev/sdX * /dev/sdX supports fewer partitions than /dev/hdX (16 versus 64, IIRC) * /dev/sdX does not support all the HDIO_xxx ioctls that /dev/hdX does. In practice, the ioctls we ignored are ones that very few people care about. * ARM, PPC and other non-x86 platform drivers are severely under-represented. As an aside, I would love to see paride updated to use libata, but we can probably count the number of paride users on one hand these days... Jeff -- VGER BF report: U 0.499983