PR469 IDE problem, was: Re: Any New 4.6.4 Issues

[Thomas Doerfler (nt)]

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Chris,

Chris Caudle schrieb:
> On Friday 16 September 2005 03:30 am, Ralf Corsepius wrote:
> 
>>A better and equally easy approach would be to write a configure script
> 
> 
> I forget, can someone remind me again why the better approach isn't to fix the 
> IDE driver?

well, hm, I have checked documentation (especially the ATA/ATAPI-6 Draft
spec). Some mechanisms are described there to find out, whether there is
only a master or only a slave is connected to a certain IDE controller,
but there is no defined mechanism to find out properly, if NO device is
attached to an IDE interface. The only method I can think of is to send
a command to the non-existing unit and wait for a timeout. The first
command to be sent to a IDE drive is a "diagnostic" command, and the
typical timeout seems to be 30 seconds or so.

So my reasons why I quickly added these two configuration switches were:
- - it can be implemented rather fast and without great risk to break
something
- - it should be there anyway, because there ARE some systems that habe
two IDE controllers and some which only have one.
- - it was the only thing I could think of how to fix it in a general way
- - and nobody else seemed to have a different solution.

Chris (or anybody else on the list), if you have a better idea how to
fix the problem and if you have the time to fix the IDE driver (I am
still not quite sure whether it is broken), then feel free to propose a
solution to PR469 and to post a patch.

wkr,
Thomas.

> 


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IMD Ingenieurbuero fuer Microcomputertechnik
Thomas Doerfler           Herbststrasse 8
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