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
8b89ef0a2d