From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: "Bartlomiej Zolnierkiewicz" Subject: Re: Kernel Summit request for Discussion of future of ATA (libata) and IDE Date: Sun, 3 Aug 2008 22:09:25 +0200 Message-ID: <58cb370e0808031309n54052c51m744c479aa69b2f4a@mail.gmail.com> References: <1217779055.4179.10.camel@localhost.localdomain> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Return-path: Received: from fg-out-1718.google.com ([72.14.220.157]:38696 "EHLO fg-out-1718.google.com" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1752761AbYHCUJ1 (ORCPT ); Sun, 3 Aug 2008 16:09:27 -0400 Received: by fg-out-1718.google.com with SMTP id 19so861747fgg.17 for ; Sun, 03 Aug 2008 13:09:25 -0700 (PDT) In-Reply-To: <1217779055.4179.10.camel@localhost.localdomain> Content-Disposition: inline Sender: linux-ide-owner@vger.kernel.org List-Id: linux-ide@vger.kernel.org To: James Bottomley Cc: ksummit-2008-discuss@lists.linux-foundation.org, linux-kernel , linux-ide I'm using gmail's interface (I don't have access to my laptop ATM) so the mail may look a bit weird... On Sun, Aug 3, 2008 at 5:57 PM, James Bottomley wrote: > Right at the moment, we have two separate subsystems for running IDE > type devices: driver/ide and drivers/ata. The claim I've seen is that > drivers/ata can do everything drivers/ide can do plus it does sata. I This claim doesn't seem to have confirmation in facts: * There is still hardware that is simply not-supported by libata at all: - architecture specific hardware (ppc, m68k, mips, arm) - "difficult" legacy PC-class hardware (i.e. secondary interface on CY82C693 etc) * There are still regressions in many libata PCI host drivers dating back to their rushed introduction. * There are still corner case in libata core - PIO is dead slow compared to drivers/ide/, "serialized" hosts are not supported, some quirks for obsolete hardware got lost... > also note that no major distribution seems to enable anything in > drivers/ide anymore, so given this is it time to deprecate drivers/ide? Major distributions make their own decisions (I don't remeber anybody from these distros discussing the conversion on linux-kernel or linux-ide) which sometimes don't match with what kernel.org kernels are doing. [ Actually one distro went so far as CONFIG_IDE=n even before support for all PC-class IDE PCI hardware present in drivers/ide was available in libata. ] Also the same major distros that use libata on x86 are using drivers/ide on non-x86. > A counter argument to the above is that not all drivers (particularly > the older ones where hw is scarce) are converted to drivers/ata, so > drivers/ide seems to be needed for some legacy systems (in which case it > can be deprecated but not removed). I've also noted that some embedded > distributions seem to be using drivers/ide, but I'm not really sure > whether this is inertia or some overriding need. drivers/ide deprecation would be a premature thing. > The proposal is to discuss the future of these two subsystems and arrive > at a consensus what's happening to each going forwards. Well, I'm looking forward to discuss the future of Linux ATA support. Thanks, Bart