Re: Changes to ide-probe.c in 2.6.9-rc2 causing improper detection

From: Jeff Garzik
Date: Tue Sep 14 2004 - 10:59:32 EST


Mark Lord wrote:
One obvious safeguard would be to never use FLUSH_CACHE on any
drive that lacks UDMA, unless the drive claims to support FLUSH_CACHE.

That will eliminate all current FLASH memory devices.

I think you're hunting for hueristics, not making a general rule. IMO any assumption that this behavior will always be limited to flash devices is a shaky assumption.

Your initial suggestion is probably much better:
But one could augment it with a check of the ATA revision code,
and possibly exclude drives that predate the *formal* introduction
of the FLUSH_CACHE command, unless their IDENTIFY data specifically
claims to include it.

That implies my code would become

if (ata version < 4)
return not-supported
if (wbcache-enabled or have-flush-cache or have-flush-cache-ext)
return supported
return not-supported

Yes?

Alan, do you still feel that the "wbcache-enabled" test should be removed?

Since wbcache-enabled is more of a hueristic than a formal test, I don't mind removing it.

Jeff


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