PATA drivers queued for 2.6.19

I just pulled the "pata-drivers" branch of libata-dev.git into the 
"upstream" branch, which means that Alan's libata PATA driver collection 
is now queued for 2.6.19.

Testing-wise, these PATA drivers have been Andrew Morton's -mm tree for 
many months.  Community-wise, no one posted objections to the PATA 
driver merge plan, when Alan posted it on LKML and linux-ide.

The following must be in all caps, though:

drivers/ide IS STILL THE PATA DRIVER SET THAT USERS AND DISTROS SHOULD 
CHOOSE.

At this time, drivers/ide should not be added to 
Documentation/feature-removal-schedule.txt.  The libata PATA driver set 
should be considered experimental still, and there remains a few 
user-visible differences between the two trees:

* Host-protected area (HPA) not ignored in libata, which means disk 
sizes differ between drivers/ide (whole disk) and libata (whole disk 
minus HPA).

* The obvious change between /dev/hdX to /dev/sdX

* /dev/sdX supports fewer partitions than /dev/hdX (16 versus 64, IIRC)

* /dev/sdX does not support all the HDIO_xxx ioctls that /dev/hdX does. 
  In practice, the ioctls we ignored are ones that very few people care 
about.

* ARM, PPC and other non-x86 platform drivers are severely 
under-represented.

As an aside, I would love to see paride updated to use libata, but we 
can probably count the number of paride users on one hand these days...

	Jeff



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VGER BF report: U 0.499983
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