Re: Kernel Summit request for Discussion of future of ATA (libata) and IDE

["Bartlomiej Zolnierkiewicz" <bzolnier@gmail.com>]

On Sun, Aug 3, 2008 at 9:17 PM, Alan Cox <alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk> 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