KernelTrap: IDE Layer Dissension

“Alan Cox maintained the 2.4 Linux kernel’s IDE layer. Then, in
August of 2003 he began a one year sabbatical, and in early 2.5
development Bartlomiej Zolnierkiewicz took over maintainership of
the IDE layer. In a recent posting to the lkml Alan complained
about broken functionality in 2.6.12-rc3 saying, ‘now I come back
to look at the ide layer ready for a 2.6.12 merge and its all a bit
messy. The open code was clean and is now duplicated. Copies of
subtly different per driver gendisk/disk layer open routines have
appeared that should be shared. The default driver handling has
been removed and half the options for obscure systems have been
marked obsolete in some Gnome like purge of functionality that
might scare small children…'”

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