Re: Switching from (deprecated) IDE driver -> SATA (PATA support)

[Bartlomiej Zolnierkiewicz]

On Sunday 25 January 2009, Justin Piszcz wrote:
> When switching (removing IDE support) in favor of the new PATA support 
> under the SATA menu, is there any best practice/or method of knowing what 
> the new root hdd will be upon reboot?
> 
> Example:
> If I have 10 sata disks and 2 IDE disks on various cards/controllers, how 
> do I know /dev/hda will become /dev/sda?  In one test on a system I have 
> here, /dev/hda became /dev/sdb2 after reboot, not an issue if the box is 
> local, but if the box is remote, how do you cope with this?  I ask now 
> because some IDE drivers have been removed (nvidia I believe? in 2.6.28) 
> and I cannot upgrade the kernel anymore unless I move to the 
> PATA-supported SATA driver, but I have no idea what the root disk will be 
> after a reboot and there is a high probability it will not come back after 
> a reboot..

Hmmm?  That's news to me and I wonder where did you hear that?

The only driver that got removed recently was HPT34X (for very, very
old HPT controllers) which was broken for ages.  In reality we are
adding new IDE host drivers and not removing them.

In 2.6.28 we got support for TX4938 and TX4939 chipsets.  2.6.29-rc1
contains a new driver for IT8172 and 2.6.29-final will hopefully have
drivers for AT91 and CS5536 chipsets.  Moreover except CS5536 all of
above chipsets are not support in other ways under Linux...

While we are at it 2.6.29 also got a whole bunch of updates to the core
IDE code -- this includes complete rewrite of locking scheme (which
is now superior to some other solutions), latency improvements for IRQ
handling and port of ide-cd over generic ATAPI support (not to mention
whole stack of bugfixes and cleanups).

Thanks,
Bart

PS as usual I encourage people to try different solutions and choose
whatever works best for them (please also remember that giving feedback
is very important if you want to see some things improved).
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