Speaking of SATA... (was flame war...)

[Benjamin Scott]

On Mon, 21 Feb 2005, at 5:31pm, puissante at biz.puissante.com wrote:
> Speaking of SATA, how well is SATA supported in 2.6? Is it at the point I
> can buy a SATA motherboard "blind" and not worry? Or do we still have a
> way to go yet?

  As I understand it, when it comes to SATA, there are two paths.

  One path essentially just hooks SATA drives up to PATA chipsets, using
some kind of emulation layer.  This appears to "just work", for both doze
and nix.  I suspect this magic works because most PATA chipsets are well
supported at this point in time.  I have a PATA PCI add-in card that doesn't
work with older Linux kernels, so I know even PATA support isn't a given.

  The other path makes SATA support into Just Another Device Driver.  In
practice, this means think of SATA as SCSI.  You need the right driver or
you go nowhere.  This is also the same on both doze and nix.  For nix, it
means driver modules or custom kernel builds; for doze it means hitting [F6]
during installer boot and loading a floppy disk.

-- 
Ben Scott <bscott at ntisys.com>
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