Bug#444182: pata disabled in ata_piix

[Frank Loeffler <knarf@cct.lsu.edu>]

Severity: important

Hi,

I was looking into the same hotswap issue and found to my surprise that
the debian kernel has the needed support _removed in the kernel sources_.

I found why this section was removed in the first place: because of bug
#419458 -> two drivers claim the same ids and there is a race as to
which wins during boot, leading to different naming schemes of the
devices.

That bug should be fixed, but I think it is really going too far to
remove the support of devices from some drivers in the source.

The current situation forces Debian users to either patch the Debian
kernels everytime there is an update and build their own packages - or
to build upstream kernels. This in mind I think the patch might do good
things on one side, but does more bad things on another side.

Please consider to drop this patch and to allow for pata support in the
piix driver. It would be very nice to have this in the next major lenny
update, for lenny itself it is long too late now, sadly.

I consider the severity of this bug to be important because it has a
major effect on the usability of the package (in this case the ability to
hotswap my hard drives / dvd drive; that is what the bay in those laptops
is for in the first place) without rendering it completely unusable to
everyone.

thanks, Frank