Re: My understanding of the IDE mess, and why it does not make sense to apply the proposed patch

[Sven Luther <sven.luther@wanadoo.fr>]

On Thu, Mar 09, 2006 at 10:51:24AM +0100, Eduard Bloch wrote:
> #include <hallo.h>
> * Jurij Smakov [Wed, Mar 08 2006, 10:35:38PM]:
> 
> > the native IDE drivers set this flag during their initialization (via82cxxx 
> > does it through the chain of calls ide_setup_pci_device() -> 
> > probe_hwif_init_with_fixup() -> hwif_init()). So, if ide-generic is loaded 
> > last, it will pick up only the interfaces, which have not been claimed by 
> > any native drivers, which is the desired result. Looking at the code I 
> > cannot see how the native drivers can depend in any way on the ide-generic 
> > being loaded before them.
> 
> I suggest going a bit further and _not_ loading ide-generic if a
> specific driver has been loaded successfully and found some devices.

There speaks the voice of reason :) why couldn't you say this at the start of
this mess ? 

> Reason? At least on my laptop ide-generic takes too long, about 30
> seconds, apparently doing probing for devices that do not exist. I can
> disable it with kernel commandline parameters but it still sucks.

Kyle also mentioned it not working on hppa.

> And I really doubt that there are that many users out there that have
> their root filesystem on a disk attached with a legacy ISA controller
> when they have a much faster PCI IDE interface. And PCI interfaces have
> been common since... 1995 or so? (at least in the x86 world)

Indeed. Yaird will clearly never go into the path introduced by this ugly
patch if there is no such pci device available.

Friendly,

Sven Luther