Subject: Re: New IDE system: first pass
To: Manuel Bouyer <bouyer@antioche.lip6.fr>
From: Chris G. Demetriou <cgd@pa.dec.com>
List: port-i386
Date: 05/20/1998 08:55:41
> 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.

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

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.

"Why don't we disable LUNs and sync/wide negotiation for all SCSI
devices because a few broken devices don't deal with them, when if
those devices actually conformed to the standards that with which they
claimed conformance they would work properly?"


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



cgd