2.5 and IDE development

[Posted June 19, 2002 by corbet]

It has been a few weeks since a "concerns about the IDE reimplementation process" article appeared here, so it must be about time. The conversation this time around started with a complaint that recent kernels can deadlock when reading partition tables; it included "a small plea for more testing" before IDE patches are unleashed upon the world. Dave Jones followed up with a remark of his own:

When the IDE carnage first started back circa 2.5.3, I had contemplated not merging *any* of the IDE patches, just so that people who want to work on other areas could have something solid to build upon. I regret not following through on that instinct.

Linus, however, remains unworried:

We're not supposed to be writing code and then releasing it when it is done. We _want_ incremental changes, and open breakage.

So the IDE process is likely to continue as it has. Be careful out there.

In a separate conversation, a user requested the restoration of the IDE taskfile operations. Those operations had been removed relatively early in Martin Dalecki's series of patches. He has not promised to restore them, but previous IDE maintainer Andre Hedrick jumped in with an interesting comment:

In the end, I will end up writing a closed ATA binary driver for sale as a replacement. I have had several requests to consider the option. As much as I do not like the idea, it is less offensive than the current direction.

It would be a shame if Linux users were driven to use a binary-only driver for such a fundamental subsystem due to lack of support for needed operations. The next stable kernel is still far away, however; plenty of time remains for these issues to be dealt with.

Jens Axboe has, meanwhile, released a version of his "tagged command queueing for IDE" patch, backported to the 2.4.19-pre kernel.

Closed!?! That's Wrong!

Posted Jun 21, 2002 23:56 UTC (Fri) by AnswerGuy (guest, #1256) [Link]

I used Andre's Paypal link to give him money to help fund his
*open source* work. From what I've read, I think the guy's a
jerk; but I gave him money (~$100 US) as a donation towards his
work (especially on serial ATA).

If this is not a complete misunderstanding then it re-inforces
my opinion.