[ILUG] disabling IRQ and SATA - Solved finally

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Paul Jakma (paul at clubi.ie):

> On Thu, 12 Aug 2004, kevin wrote:
> 
> >the notes that it is supported in 2.6 kernels, will it finally 
> >replace the other sata drivers in the kernel?
> 
> Eventually, yes, I guess, not just SATA, but other ATA hosts too. 

It seems _likely_ that libata will at some point completely replace
Bartlomiej Zolnierkiewicz's older stock ATA driver collection (ide.c,
etc.), but the matter hasn't been decided.  However, what it _cannot_
replace is the separate ataraid driver and its various subdrivers,
because it doesn't include the covered chipsets' RAID drivers.  For
example, the ataraid/medley (or ataraid/silraid) stack supports the
semi-proprietary "Medley" software RAID sets commonly encountered on
systems with Silicon Image 3112 chips.

Although "md" Linux softare RAID is far superior, people with existing
Medley raidsets (for dual boot) have reason to favour ataraid/medley.

> Eg, iirc libata has a driver for the intel PIIX family of IDE 
> controllers.

Yes.  ata_piix.

Meanwhile, note that the libata collection has finally been merged into
the stock 2.4 kernel, as of 2.4.27.

> You mean to remove the siimage driver. There is no driver called 
> si3112, that's the chip name of the SATA host ASIC, made by Silicon 
> Image. There are two drivers, siimage, which is an IDE layer driver, 
> and sata_sil, which is a libata driver, which plugs into the SCSI 
> layer.

Actually, there are three:  You forgot the ataraid/medley stack (which
replaces the earlier ataraid/silraid stack).

> Some caveats about libata:
> 
> - ATAPI isnt supported yet.
> - SMART isnt supported yet.
> - libata can not reissue failed commands, apparently these are to be
>   expected every now and then, but libata doesnt deal with it at all.

SMART support code was present as of 2004-04-24, and just needs
passthrough of ATA commands to smartmontools.  So, very soon.

Hotswap isn't supported yet, either.  (Use 3Ware if you need that on
ATA.)  Last, Tagged Command Queuing is just now being coded in CVS.

-- 
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