“Alan Cox offered an updated libATA PATA (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…”