Re: [PATCH] remove ide-scsi

Willem Riede
2008-12-06T15:25:47Z

On Sat, Dec 6, 2008 at 7:51 AM, Bartlomiej Zolnierkiewicz
<bzolnier@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wednesday 03 December 2008, James Bottomley wrote:
>> On Wed, 2008-12-03 at 05:06 -0500, Christoph Hellwig wrote:
>> > On Wed, Dec 03, 2008 at 10:38:54AM +0900, FUJITA Tomonori wrote:
>> > > This is for 2.6.29 (not 2.6.28) as feature-removal-schedule.txt says.
>> > >
>> > > It's against linux-next (which seems to has some changes to ide-scsi
>> > > for 2.6.29 from the ide tree).
>> >
>> > Isn't ide-scsi the only way to use ATAPI OnStream tapes supported by
>> > the osst driver?
>>
>> Depends. If you're still using drivers/ide then yes, it is. With
>> libata (which is what most modern distros use), osst just works as an
>> ATAPI transport.
>>
>> git log tells me ide-scsi has been updated quite a bit recently, but it
>> mostly looks to be fallout around the drivers/ide churn. Can we get ide
>> maintainer's buy in for this (I think they've been maintaining ide-tape
>> and ide-cd in preference to ide-scsi)?
>
> Certainly, native ide-{cd,gd,tape} drivers are far superior over ide-scsi
> and are actively maintained.
>
> ide-scsi has been practically a dead code for a long time now (IIRC it has
> even been broken -- by some general kernel changes -- for few releases and
> nobody noticed, till Boaz discovered it while doing unrelated SCSI fixes)
> but I kept it on the live support anyway. However there needs to be some
> limit to it, especially given that driver has been officially orphaned for
> over a year now and nobody stepped in...
>
> I applied the scheduled removal patch to pata-2.6 tree, thanks Tomo!
>
> Thanks,
> Bart
>
> PS If somebody wants to work on OSST support for IDE we can provide an
> assistance into porting osst.c over generic ATAPI code -- it would still
> be much less hassle than trying to figure out remaining ide-scsi issues
> (lifetime rules for IDE / SCSI / IDE-SCSI objects, error handling etc.).
>
Don't know exactly what you mean with "porting osst.c over generic ATAPI code",
but osst is SCSI by design - a SCSI version of the drive exists.
Making osst ATAPI
is therefore not appropriate. If osst works with libata as earlier suggested,
then that would be the best solution.

Unfortunately, my IDE test drive died, OnStream went out of business some time
ago, so I can't get a new one, hence I (osst maintainer) can't test this :-(

Regards, Willem Riede.