Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id ; Sun, 14 Jul 2002 04:14:00 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id ; Sun, 14 Jul 2002 04:13:59 -0400 Received: from ppp1217-cwdsl.fr.cw.net ([62.210.116.194]:40210 "EHLO calvin.paulbristow.lan") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id ; Sun, 14 Jul 2002 04:13:58 -0400 Message-ID: <3D313412.1030102@paulbristow.net> Date: Sun, 14 Jul 2002 10:19:30 +0200 From: Paul Bristow User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.0.0) Gecko/20020529 X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Kernel Mailing List Subject: Re: IDE/ATAPI in 2.5 References: <3D2EE7BA.8080805@evision-ventures.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-2; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Content-Length: 2337 Lines: 66 Martin Dalecki wrote: >Workarouns in ide-floppy - ZIP drives and Clock drives. > >Those are the main "technical issues" which make one hessitate. > > Sorry, late to this thread. Look, ide-floppy has to deal with real world devices, which simply don't follow nice, written specifications. If we treat these devices as standard ATAPI they simply don't work. And a bunch of planned features which were waiting for 2.5 but are now in limbo until the IDE subsystem is stable enough for me to work on. Features include: Trying again to kill the via chipset/Zip interaction (some people are still suffering). Kevin Flemings media detect work: needs ATA commands because the ATAPI command set simply doesn't return the information we need. Then we can make ide-floppy drives work *properly* with devfs. Handling the "special" BIOS settings around LS-120/240/Zip bootable drives. Making sure that formatting works properly for non-standard format capacities (i.e. 1.44MB in LS-120, 32MB in LS-240) And yes, I have real users asking for these things. So to me the problem is not to make everything work as SCSI, because that simply isn't true for ide-floppy devices. They *nearly* work, so you can get kludgy, "good enough for command line gurus" working with ide-scsi, but there are some funnies. Does it really make sense to have IDE/ATAPI kludges down in the SCSI tree? I much prefer Linus's suggestion of agreeing on the top level API. I would like to see disks, and removeable media having a single unified namespace and set of ioctls so that the different user-space programs don't need to worry about if they are dealing with a SCSI, PPA, ATAPI-ish, USB, 1394 or whatever comes next drive. Is that work? yes, but it's also about communication and keeping things in the appropriate place. Let me hide the horrible things ide-floppy has to do from user-space, and if that means I/we have to completely re-write the ioctls etc so be it. -- Paul /* ide-floppy maintainer */ Email: paul@paulbristow.net Web: http://paulbristow.net ICQ: 11965223 - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/