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pdc20265 problem.

PATCH Petr Vandrovec 2 participants 2 messages Aug 7, 2002

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Quoted 10 lines · Adam J. Richter
Quoted 4 lines · Nick Orlov

But wouldn't it be a cleaner solution if we will have _compile_ time option that by default is turned on in order to handle rare cases, and _can_ be turned off in order to handle _most_ cases without any boot-time options?

Linux users in the "I'm not a sysadmin" crowd (?) probably
don't care about the scan order of the pdc20265 IDE controller, but people in the "I'm a sysadmin, not a programmer" crowd may have legitimiate reasons to.

But such "I'm not a sysadmin" people will be very surprised that their promise was IDE2 in 2.2.x, it was IDE2 in 2.4.18, it is IDE2 in 2.5.30, and now - oops - it is IDE0 in 2.4.19. Broken, I'd say.

There is an CONFIG_BLK_DEV_OFFBOARD option (apparently unused...), so use this one, if some distribution must force ide0= to promise if their installer cannot find master disk on /dev/hde. But changing behavior for no reason - especially in the middle of stable series - is IMHO unacceptable.

Fortunately I use 2.5.30's IDE for real work ;-)
Petr Vandrovec [email protected]

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Quoted 10 lines · Petr Vandrovec
Quoted 4 lines · Adam J. Richter

Linux users in the "I'm not a sysadmin" crowd (?) probably
don't care about the scan order of the pdc20265 IDE controller, but people in the "I'm a sysadmin, not a programmer" crowd may have legitimiate reasons to.

But such "I'm not a sysadmin" people will be very surprised that their promise was IDE2 in 2.2.x, it was IDE2 in 2.4.18, it is IDE2 in 2.5.30, and now - oops - it is IDE0 in 2.4.19. Broken, I'd say.

And on that one I really do agree. A change like that in 2.5 wouldn't bother me beyond usual ten minutes of consigning whoever did it to the darkest level of hell ;-) I would think that distributions would ship with a kernel which follows Plauger's "law of least astonishment," so it may not matter unless you roll your own. Kind of violates the idea of "stable" IMHO, but I have other design decisions which bother me far more.

Quoted 5 lines

There is an CONFIG_BLK_DEV_OFFBOARD option (apparently unused...), so use this one, if some distribution must force ide0= to promise if their installer cannot find master disk on /dev/hde. But changing behavior for no reason - especially in the middle of stable series - is IMHO unacceptable.

I disagree with "no reason," there was a reason, but I do think it was a bad idea. There just aren't that many people with an onboard controller to justify a change. My opinion, of course.

Quoted 1 line

Fortunately I use 2.5.30's IDE for real work ;-)

I use 2.5 kernels to test my backups :-( The last one I ran drooled spillage in every attached drive, including my BSD drive which is on an offboard controller. I would tell you the version, but it gone. Somewhere in the 2.5.24..27 range.

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bill davidsen <[email protected]>
  CTO, TMR Associates, Inc
Doing interesting things with little computers since 1979.