Messages in this thread | | | Date | Sun, 14 Jul 2002 10:19:30 +0200 | From | Paul Bristow <> | Subject | Re: IDE/ATAPI in 2.5 |
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Martin Dalecki wrote:
>Workarouns in ide-floppy - ZIP drives and Clock drives. > >Those are the main "technical issues" which make one hessitate. > > Sorry, late to this thread. Look, ide-floppy has to deal with real world devices, which simply don't follow nice, written specifications. If we treat these devices as standard ATAPI they simply don't work.
And a bunch of planned features which were waiting for 2.5 but are now in limbo until the IDE subsystem is stable enough for me to work on.
Features include:
Trying again to kill the via chipset/Zip interaction (some people are still suffering).
Kevin Flemings media detect work: needs ATA commands because the ATAPI command set simply doesn't return the information we need. Then we can make ide-floppy drives work *properly* with devfs.
Handling the "special" BIOS settings around LS-120/240/Zip bootable drives.
Making sure that formatting works properly for non-standard format capacities (i.e. 1.44MB in LS-120, 32MB in LS-240)
And yes, I have real users asking for these things.
So to me the problem is not to make everything work as SCSI, because that simply isn't true for ide-floppy devices. They *nearly* work, so you can get kludgy, "good enough for command line gurus" working with ide-scsi, but there are some funnies. Does it really make sense to have IDE/ATAPI kludges down in the SCSI tree?
I much prefer Linus's suggestion of agreeing on the top level API. I would like to see disks, and removeable media having a single unified namespace and set of ioctls so that the different user-space programs don't need to worry about if they are dealing with a SCSI, PPA, ATAPI-ish, USB, 1394 or whatever comes next drive. Is that work? yes, but it's also about communication and keeping things in the appropriate place. Let me hide the horrible things ide-floppy has to do from user-space, and if that means I/we have to completely re-write the ioctls etc so be it.
--
Paul
/* ide-floppy maintainer */
Email: paul@paulbristow.net Web: http://paulbristow.net ICQ: 11965223
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