2.6.11-rc3-bk1: ide1: failed to initialize IDE interface

[Jean Delvare <khali@linux-fr.org>]

Hi all,

I just gave a quick try to 2.6.11-rc3-bk1, and noticed the following
new message in dmesg:
ide1: failed to initialize IDE interface

This seems to be new in 2.6.11-rc3-bk1. I could find the relevant
changeset in bk:
http://linux.bkbits.net:8080/linux-2.5/cset@1.1992.9.16

My (admittedly quick) analysis of the code (drivers/ide/ide-probe.c) is
that init_hwif() can return 0 in two cases: either because the IDE
interface is somehow not really there (!hwif->present) or because
something wrong happened while initializing the IDE interface. My
system's ide1 happens to be enabled (BIOS settings) but no IDE device is
connected to it. I traced the code and it unsurprisingly happens that I
am in the first "error" case - init_hwif() exits immediately because
!hwif->present.

I would tend to think that this is *not* an error, so we shouldn't
display an error message in this case. Maybe init_hwif() should return 1
instead of 0 in this case. Or maybe it should return -1, 0 and 1 for
error, no interface and success, respectively. I'm not certain I
understand the semantics behind the returned value, does it mean
error/success or interface absent/present (or a bit of each)? Or maybe
we could move the error message into init_hwif() itself, but that would
require some error path changes.

I do not propose a patch because I'm not exactly sure what has to be
done, but I still believe something has to be done. Insight anyone?

Thanks,
-- 
Jean Delvare