Linux: libATA PATA Status Report

Alan Cox [interview] offered an updated libATAPATA (IDE) status report. He summarized, "with the exception of HPA and serialize support its now pretty close to a straight replacement for drivers/ide on x86 systems (and boxes using PCI devices only). There is other stuff that wants improving still like error recovery on CRC, but its getting close."

He provides a list of recent changes then cautions, "please remember that functionality equivalence, and much cleaner code doesn't mean less bugs yet, there is a *lot* of testing and hammering on the code needed before it is production ready for switching." His current patch is for the 2.6.16-rc2 kernel.