Re: [PATCH] 2.5.6 IDE 19, return of taskfile

Andre Hedrick
2002-03-11T19:15:28Z

Gunther,

http://www.t13.org/technical/d99114r0.pdf

See in working documents we use the terms we all know,

Cheers,

Andre Hedrick
The Second Linux X-IDE guy

On Mon, 11 Mar 2002, Gunther Mayer wrote:

> Andre Hedrick wrote:
>
> > On Mon, 11 Mar 2002, Martin Dalecki wrote:
> >
> > >
> > > It wasn't a claim but just a suspiction. So this is cleared.
> > > But apparently there is no special IBM command using taskfile
> > > to do magic things to it. So therefore it's still valid:
> > > your example was indeed a mock-up.
> >
> > No, mine has there real test base, I goto there Lab people and submit
> > examples and questions and learn. I doubt they will listen to you reading
> > your code base, since you have claimed taskfile is wrong. It was
> > developed in concert with IBM.
> >
>
> The ANSI/NCITS ATA Standard documents lack proper definition what
> a "task file" or "taskfile" is ! ATA-1, -2, -3 don't mention this (at least acroread
> didn't find),
> ATAPI-4 has 3 references but no definition. This is a serious omission for a
> well-written standard !
> Andre, will this be corrected in some newer standard you participate? ( Don't know
> about ata-5/6 yet)
>
> These two meanings certainly explain some confusion about "taskfile":
> 1) The IDE register set (e.g. 0x1f0-0x1f7) used by a special state-machine (e.g.
> ATAPI)
> 2) Andres implementation to export the "task file" to user mode
> (as in his patches which were refused by Linus)
>
> Andre, your approach to "parse" the takfile access and let only known commands
> through
> must be weighted against a "generic" taskfile ioctl, where _I_ give all needed
> state-machine information
> (incl. state-machine as needed) to serve my reuqest.
>
> Currently your taskfile access is hardcoded in tables in your ide patches and this is
>
> inflexible (e.g. cannot support future commands, unknown at the time of your writing)
> !
>
> Your "case" structures and accompanying code are considered kernel bloat, because
> it can be done in user code (with a "generic ioctl" and a "generic task file state
> machine" which surely
> can be extracted from your patch).
>
> Regards, Gunther
>
> P.S.
> For some more fun read
> http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;q239700
>
>