Linux: PATA Drivers in LibATA

Alan Cox [interview] provided astatus update on his PATA driver efforts with libata [story]. He offered a qualified call for testers, "some initial patches are now ready for wider testing although strictly suicide squad material at this point." His status document currently lists 11 drivers about which he notes, "a lot of hardware isn't yet covered - I'm working on adding more support but I wanted to start with weirder devices first to better understand what was needed in libata."

In the brief thread, error handling was brought into question. Alan noted, "basic error handling in the libata code seems to work as well when I tested it, if not better because the old PATA code hangs the box on SMP or pre-empt if you get a DMA timeout and cable changedown due to locking flaws and also issues an immediate idle in error recovery which seems to crash some drives for good." He went on to point out that failed cable detect currently isn't supported by libata, "the speed change down support simply isn't in libata yet and that turns a downspeed change for poor cables or cable misdetect into a hang."