Re: [PATCH] Cleanup libata HPA support

[Robert Hancock <hancockr@shaw.ca>]

Ben Collins wrote:
> The original HPA patch that Kyle worked on has gone into current git
> without some fixes that we worked through late in the Ubuntu feisty
> release. Here's the main copy of the notes I sent to Alan a few weeks
> ago in regards to the original patch, and a repatch against current git
> to fix things up. Note we have released feisty with the patch attached
> (albeit we have HPA enabled by default), and we have not had any reports
> directly attributed to it. However, in gutsy (devel for next release,
> based on current stock linux-2.6.git), we are already seeing reports of
> the same issues we already fixed. 
> 
> The issues we saw were mainly that some controllers didn't return the
> correct size from the SET_MAX command (sata_nv is a good example). So I
> added a re IDENTIFY after the SET_MAX, and compared all the numbers. If
> re-id was correct, but return value from SET_MAX wasn't we print a
> warning and use the IDENTIFY value regardless (since that's what the
> device is going to use).
> 
> Because we re IDENTIFY, there was also no need to keep n_sectors_boot
> around, so that was removed. The ata_hpa_resize() was changed to handle
> everything in a single call (checks for HPA support of the device, and
> whether ignore_hpa is set or not), and it also sets dev->n_sectors
> before returning.
> 
> So far with this patch, we were able to fix all the problems we were
> seeing with it (except the sata_nv issue where we had to revert to not
> using adma for NO_DATA transactions, already reported to libata-dev).
> We've not had any reports of further problems.

That sata_nv issue should not be present anymore in the current 
libata-dev tree.

-- 
Robert Hancock      Saskatoon, SK, Canada
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