On Sat, 1 Mar 1997, Jonathan Stone wrote:

> 
> Perry Metzger writes:
> 
> >The ATAPI code is considered "not quite finished"; perhaps its author
> >can speak about its status?
> 
> I'm not the author, but AFAIK, the unfinished-ness was lack of support
> for audio CDs and audio CD commands.  That's now fixed; I beleive the
> latest ATAPI patches include support for an X-based CD player.
> 
> A more severe problem is that someone in Core wants the ATAPI code to
> be re-written to be layered on top of the existing SCSI code and (if
> memory serves) the existing SCSI cd driver.  Whereas the author of the
> ATAPI patches doesn't agree that's the correct design decision,
> because an  ATAPI CD  isn't *quite* identical to a SCSI CD, and
> the differences  are sufficient to make things ugly.
> 
> I don't know the details of the ATAPI CD interface to make a comment,
> but I really wish Manuel Bouyer and Jason Thorpe could reach some
> agreement on that issue. Otherwise Manuel's ATAPI patches may *never*
> be integtated into the tree.  IMHO that would be unfortunte.

Hi,
  Something I have been looking at is a rewrite of the IDE drivers to
provide an ATA layer and an ATAPI layer. One of the things I am looking at
for the ATAPI code is providing a bridge to a scsibus so that SCSI drivers
could be used. There are some differences though between CDROM drives but
these may be worked around. tape drives look as though they may not be so
much of a problem.
If CDROMs prove too difficult to share the one CDROM driver a separate
ATAPI CDROM driver could still be used (A driver based Manuel Bouyer's
ATAPI code could be used for this).

This code uses bus space macros so while I am currently developing and
testing it on the arm32 port it is MI.
My aim is that when this is complete it will be able to replace the
existing wd driver and variations on it used by various ports.

As yet this is not complete and is still a little way of due to lack of
time. This means that although the existing wd driver may be changing
sometime in the distant future I would like to see Manuel's ATAPI patches
applied to the existing wd driver.

Cheers,
				Mark