Bug#345067: My understanding of the IDE mess, and why it does not make sense to apply the proposed patch
On Fri, Mar 10, 2006 at 12:00:50AM -0800, Jurij Smakov wrote:
> When ide-generic is included (it is loaded after all the native ide
> modules), the kernel boots fine. The reason is that in the Debian
> 2.6.8 sources the ide-generic initialization procedure contains the
> call to ide_scan_pcibus(), which actually does the detection of PCI
> IDE devices. Function probe_for_hwifs() in ide.c contains a call to
> ide_scan_pcibus() as well, but there it is only called if ide.c is
> built-in, and not a part of a module (it normally goes into
> ide-core). So, in Debian's 2.6.8 loading of ide-generic is really
> essential, and it should be loaded after all the native modules, which
> just register PCI drivers for specific chipsets. Note that the
> upstream kernel source does not operate like this. ide-generic does
> NOT contain a call to ide_scan_pcibus(), this situation is the result
> of Debian-specific patches, in particular modular IDE patch,
> originally introduced by Herbert Xu.
Oh, ...
So, if i understood you right, this bug was introduced with Herbert Xu's
modular IDE patch, and it was ever present only in debian kernel sources, and
was dropped for 2.6.15.
This means that right now, apart from snapshot.debian.org, it is available
exclusively in sarge's 2.6.8 kernel-source package, which is supposed to be
used with sarge's initrd-tools anyway, or other sarge ramdisk generation
tools.
That means that jonas's fear of breaking self-built kernels is vastly
unfunded, and that he should remove those hacks, include a mention of the
broken kernels in the README file, and maybe propose a fixed yaird to
stable-proposed-updates or something.
Alternatively, we could propose a fixed kenrel to stable-proposed-update which
removes the herbert-xu modular ide patch.
Friendly,
Sven Luther
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