On Thu, Dec 09, 1999 at 10:19:36PM +0100, Ignatios Souvatzis wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> for the Amiga, there are a couple of nearly-IDE interfaces, that don't contain
> the 0x3f6 register (interupt enable, soft reset on write; alternate status
> on read). 

The alternate status could be cool but we don't use it now, but the ATA-5
draft explicitely mention its use in the protocols. I'm not sure we will be
able to always avoid its use in the future.

> 
> Whould it work to leave out the hard part of the probing, and replace them 
> by something more soft, like, issue ATA identify and ATAPI identify commands
> to both units and see what answers?

I'd like to do something like this, this would also help for hot-swap support.
This is on my to-do list but I don't think it will be ready for 1.5.
I think this will require a different driver (or at last a different front-end)
for pre-ata disks, but this may be a good thing (who need pre-ata support
on modern or non-i386 machine ?)

--
Manuel Bouyer <bouyer@antioche.eu.org>
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