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



On Thu, 9 Mar 2006 10:51:24 +0100
Eduard Bloch <edi@gmx.de> wrote:

> #include <hallo.h>
> * Jurij Smakov [Wed, Mar 08 2006, 10:35:38PM]:
> 
> > Looking at the code I cannot see how the native drivers can depend
> > in any way on the ide-generic being loaded before them.

ide-generic is loaded _after_ possibly-problematic drivers, not before.


> I suggest going a bit further and _not_ loading ide-generic if a
> specific driver has been loaded successfully and found some devices.

I welcome the proposal of improving yaird to only load ide-generic if
the device did not work with the possibly-problematic driver alone.

yaird (unlike initramfs) wants to be certain at image build time,
however, where IDE drivers cannot all be (unloaded and re)loaded one
after the other until succesful. So the ide-generic module still needs
to be included in the ramdisk for yaird to keep its principle of only
reporting success if confident the ramdisk actually works.

So for this to solve the issue at hand of yaird not working with
powerpc kernels not building ide-generic at all, yaird would have to
drop support for kernels older than those with known-working IDE
drivers. This seems to be 2.6.15 (based on Svens code review rather
than my using rumors from yaird upstream notes).


> 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.
> 
> 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

Sounds sane that the main purpose of ide-generic is for use with ISA
cards and other strange beasts.

I believe the abuse of ide-generic to make other drivers work is a
different matter, however.


So please file a separate wishlist bugreport against yaird to only use
the ide-generic workaround after failed test of the driver working
without it.


 - Jonas

-- 
* Jonas Smedegaard - idealist og Internet-arkitekt
* Tlf.: +45 40843136  Website: http://dr.jones.dk/

 - Enden er nær: http://www.shibumi.org/eoti.htm

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