Re: Switching from (deprecated) IDE driver -> SATA (PATA support)

[Bill Davidsen <davidsen@tmr.com>]

Bartlomiej Zolnierkiewicz wrote:
> On Sunday 25 January 2009, Justin Piszcz wrote:
>> On Sun, 25 Jan 2009, Bartlomiej Zolnierkiewicz wrote:
>>
>>> On Sunday 25 January 2009, Justin Piszcz wrote:
>>>> When switching (removing IDE support) in favor of the new PATA support
>>>> under the SATA menu, is there any best practice/or method of knowing what
>>>> the new root hdd will be upon reboot?
>>>>
>>>> Example:
>>>> If I have 10 sata disks and 2 IDE disks on various cards/controllers, how
>>>> do I know /dev/hda will become /dev/sda?  In one test on a system I have
>>>> here, /dev/hda became /dev/sdb2 after reboot, not an issue if the box is
>>>> local, but if the box is remote, how do you cope with this?  I ask now
>>>> because some IDE drivers have been removed (nvidia I believe? in 2.6.28)
>>>> and I cannot upgrade the kernel anymore unless I move to the
>>>> PATA-supported SATA driver, but I have no idea what the root disk will be
>>>> after a reboot and there is a high probability it will not come back after
>>>> a reboot..
>>> Hmmm?  That's news to me and I wonder where did you hear that?
>>>
>>> The only driver that got removed recently was HPT34X (for very, very
>>> old HPT controllers) which was broken for ages.  In reality we are
>>> adding new IDE host drivers and not removing them.
>>>
>>> In 2.6.28 we got support for TX4938 and TX4939 chipsets.  2.6.29-rc1
>>> contains a new driver for IT8172 and 2.6.29-final will hopefully have
>>> drivers for AT91 and CS5536 chipsets.  Moreover except CS5536 all of
>>> above chipsets are not support in other ways under Linux...
>>>
>>> While we are at it 2.6.29 also got a whole bunch of updates to the core
>>> IDE code -- this includes complete rewrite of locking scheme (which
>>> is now superior to some other solutions), latency improvements for IRQ
>>> handling and port of ide-cd over generic ATAPI support (not to mention
>>> whole stack of bugfixes and cleanups).
>>>
>>> Thanks,
>>> Bart
>>>
>>> PS as usual I encourage people to try different solutions and choose
>>> whatever works best for them (please also remember that giving feedback
>>> is very important if you want to see some things improved).
>>>
>> Correction, it was the HPT controller as you noted, broken? Was working 
>> for me in 2.6.26.3 :)
>>
>> CONFIG_BLK_DEV_HPT34X=y
>> # CONFIG_HPT34X_AUTODMA is not set
>> CONFIG_BLK_DEV_HPT366=y
> 
> HPT34X driver got removed not HPT366.
> 
> However if you need we can bring support for HPT34x hardware back. :)

I don't think "bring it back" is enough, it had some major issues as I recall. I 
actually have a pile of these, but not running any recent kernel.

-- 
Bill Davidsen <davidsen@tmr.com>
   "We have more to fear from the bungling of the incompetent than from
the machinations of the wicked."  - from Slashdot