It been awhile since the last major update, as a benefit there
are some cool things in this one (and new bugs probably :) )...
The ATA driver has grown "real" timeout support for all devices.
This means that it should be possible to get in contact with
(especially) lost ATAPI devices. It also means that the ATA
driver is now usable on notebooks as it will DTRT on resume.
An experimental hack at utilizing the Promise66's at UDMA66 is
in there, but I cant test it. If someone feels like sending
me one, give me a ping.
The ATAPI DMA enableling scheme has been changed, also better DMA
support for the Aladdin chipset has been implemented for ATAPI
devices. Note that the Aladdin apparently only can do DMA reads
on ATAPI devices, and the Promise cant do ATAPI DMA at all.
I have seen problems on some ATAPI devices that should be able
to run in DMA mode, so if you encounter problems with hanging
atapi devices during the probe, or during access, disable DMA
in atapi-all.c, and let me know. It might be nessesary to do this
via a "white list" for known good devices...
The ATAPI CDROM driver can now use eject/close without hanging and
the bug that caused reading beyond the end of a CD has been fixed.
Media change is also handled proberly. DVD drives are identified
and are usable as CDROM devices at least, I dont have the HW to
test this further, see above :).
The ATAPI tape driver has gotten some support for using the DSC
method for not blocking the IDE channel during read/write when
the device has full buffers. It knows about the OnStream DI-30
device, support is not completed yet, but it can function as a
primitive backup medium, without filemarks, and without bad media
handeling. This is because the OnStream device doesn't handle this
(like everybody else) in HW. It also now supports getting/setting
the record position on devices that supports it.
Some rather major cleanups and rearrangements as well (cvs -b diff
is your freind). I'm closing in on declaring this for beta code,
most of the infrastruture is in place by now.
As usual USE AT YOUR OWN RISK!!, this is still alpha level code.
This driver can hose your disk real bad if anything goes wrong, but
now you have been warned :)
But please tell me how it works for you!
Enjoy!
-Søren
Diskslice/label code not yet handled.
Vinum, i4b, alpha, pc98 not dealt with (left to respective Maintainers)
Add the correct hook for devfs to kern_conf.c
The net result of this excercise is that a lot less files depends on DEVFS,
and devtoname() gets more sensible output in many cases.
A few drivers had minor additional cleanups performed relating to cdevsw
registration.
A few drivers don't register a cdevsw{} anymore, but only use make_dev().
Added "options ATA_STATIC_ID" that wires ATA disks like the old wd driver.
Fixed problems:
Dont use more sectors/intr than the drive supports.
Fix announce of > 8.4G disks.
Dont call ad_interrupt/ad_transfer when no disks config'd.
Use the right page# for CDR write mode params.
Fix breakage when no PCI support in kernel.
Implement DEVFS stuff.
General code clenaup.
The much roumored replacement for our current IDE/ATA/ATAPI is
materialising in the CVS repositories around the globe.
So what does this bring us:
A new reengineered ATA/ATAPI subsystem, that tries to overcome
most of the deficiencies with the current drivers.
It supports PCI as well as ISA devices without all the hackery
in ide_pci.c to make PCI devices look like ISA counterparts.
It doesn't have the excessive wait problem on probe, in fact you
shouldn't notice any delay when your devices are getting probed.
Probing and attaching of devices are postponed until interrupts
are enabled (well almost, not finished yet for disks), making
things alot cleaner.
Improved performance, although DMA support is still WIP and not
in this pre alpha release, worldstone is faster with the new
driver compared to the old even with DMA.
So what does it take away:
There is NO support for old MFM/RLL/ESDI disks.
There is NO support for bad144, if your disk is bad, ditch it, it has
already outgrown its internal spare sectors, and is dying.
For you to try this out, you will have to modify your kernel config
file to use the "ata" controller instead of all wdc? entries.
example:
# for a PCI only system (most modern machines)
controller ata0
device atadisk0 # ATA disks
device atapicd0 # ATAPI CDROM's
device atapist0 # ATAPI tapes
#You should add the following on ISA systems:
controller ata1 at isa? port "IO_WD1" bio irq 14
controller ata2 at isa? port "IO_WD2" bio irq 15
You can leave it all in there, the system knows how to manage.
For now this driver reuses the device entries from the old system
(that will probably change later), but remember that disks are
now numbered in the sequence they are found (like the SCSI system)
not as absolute positions as the old system.
Although I have tested this on all the systems I can get my hands on,
there might very well be gremlins in there, so use AT YOU OWN RISK!!
This is still WIP, so there are lots of rough edges and unfinished
things in there, and what I have in my lab might look very different
from whats in CVS at any given time. So please have all eventual
changes go through me, or chances are they just dissapears...
I would very much like to hear from you, both good and bad news
are very welcome.
Enjoy!!
-Søren
