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 22:19:40 +0200 Message-ID: <58cb370e0808031319o748e570bo700873365ba22aa1@mail.gmail.com> References: <1217779055.4179.10.camel@localhost.localdomain> <20080803173941.314edf33@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk> <1217783433.4179.18.camel@localhost.localdomain> <20080803194501.24fa3e51@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk> <1217791284.4179.34.camel@localhost.localdomain> <20080803201719.576f85f6@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk> 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 ([72.14.220.155]:42025 "EHLO fg-out-1718.google.com" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1756702AbYHCUTn (ORCPT ); Sun, 3 Aug 2008 16:19:43 -0400 Received: by fg-out-1718.google.com with SMTP id 19so862682fgg.17 for ; Sun, 03 Aug 2008 13:19:40 -0700 (PDT) In-Reply-To: <20080803201719.576f85f6@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk> Content-Disposition: inline Sender: linux-ide-owner@vger.kernel.org List-Id: linux-ide@vger.kernel.org To: Alan Cox Cc: James Bottomley , ksummit-2008-discuss@lists.linux-foundation.org, linux-kernel , linux-ide On Sun, Aug 3, 2008 at 9:17 PM, Alan Cox wrote: >> I don't envisage anything in terms of code changes (or removal) coming >> out of this. What I would like is a nice roadmap of where to start for >> people contemplating writing IDE drivers. > > For the vendors I've talked with the answer is usually "both". A libata > driver for the future and current distributions, and an old IDE driver > for older RHEL and SLES releases. Fortunately the driver specific parts > for those that are capable of running under old IDE are not too hard to > plug into libata. The contrary is also true, for modern drivers/ide conversion of libata PATA driver to use drivers/ide should usually be a matter of an hour or two. I think that the conversion of libata drivers for PATA hardware that is not supported by drivers/ide currently should be doable by somebody knowing both subsystems in less than 24h. I'm not doing it only because it will make me a maintainer of even more host drivers than currently and I don't have a time for it. I'll happily accept patches though. Thanks, Bart