In message <24312.895679741@dnaunix.pa.dec.com>, "Chris G. Demetriou" writes:
>> I added a table of supported devices vendor/IDs to pciide.c. It is used at
>> probe/attach time, the device has to be in the table to be attached.
>> The reason for this is that I found some devices don't behave in a standart
>> way, preventing the machine to boot. Claiming support for any PCI IDE chip
>> may end up in loosages for users.

>This is backwards, in my opinion.

Seconded!

>There's a standard interface.  Devices which claim to support the
>standard interface should be supported by the driver.

Yes!  I use a Macintosh.  It will not use *ANY* SCSI disk made today, because
the O/S has a table of supported SCSI devices.  It contains only those SCSI
devices that have been shipped with Macintoshes.

Third party drivers will, of course, work with "any SCSI device".

Compare the number of SCSI devices out there to the size of the quirks table.

>There may be a few special cases where devices claim to support the
>standard interface and don't.  That's a device bug, and should be
>handled specially, not by penalizing all of the controllers that do
>the right thing but that we don't happen to have specific information
>on.

Yes!

>"Punish" and treat as broken the special, broken, cases, not
>non-broken devices.

(However, GENERIC systems may want to avoid device probes that can fry
other hardware.)

-s