Re: libata PATA support - work items?

[Bartlomiej Zolnierkiewicz <bzolnier@gmail.com>]

Hi,

On Mon, 3 Jan 2005 14:20:40 -0700, Eric Mudama <edmudama@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, 3 Jan 2005 15:56:58 -0500, Greg Freemyer
> <greg.freemyer@gmail.com> wrote:
> > I may be in the minority, but my company does computer forensics.  We
> > routinely connect old drives to Linux boxes and make dd images of
> > them.
> >
> > We definately need CHS support at some level in the kernel.  If this
> > were ever dropped, we would have to quit using Linux for this job.
> >
> > FYI, there are hundreds if not thousands of companies that provide
> > this service.  The current standard for the industry is to perform
> > these images from a DOS boot floppy, but using Linux is far superior
> > in my mind and there is a small but growing body of professionals
> > using Linux for Computer Forensic Imaging.
> 
> Would it be a problem to keep any of the existing 2.4 or non-libata
> 2.6 systems around?  Since you're doing it now, I wouldn't expect it
> to be a problem to keep them running so you can continue connecting to
> very old hard drives.
> 
> I'm simply trying to say that it'd be nice if future libata stayed
> focused on non-CHS mode stuff, since CHS has been obsolete from the
> ATA specifications for years.  Revision 5 of the ATA-3 specification,
> 6 October 1995, made LBA support mandatory for all disk drives
> claiming support of that level of the spec.  Over 9 years ago.
> 
> Obviously, forensics and data recovery are cases where you might be
> working with 9+ year old hard drive, but for that I would think we can
> keep the existing PATA drivers around if maintaining an older system
> wasn't an option, for those who need it.
> 
> Would that work?

Existing IDE drivers are not going away any time soon (not 2.6.x at least)
and if/when this happens we shouldn't drop CHS support completely
from the kernel - IMHO it is quite easy to add CHS support to libata.
I also agree that libata PATA development should be focused on LBA
but I don't see any problem in keeping CHS support around...

Cheers,
Bartlomiej