[ltp] Re: Hot swap on recent thinkpads (old IDE piix vs ata_piix)

[Marc MERLIN]

On Wed, Dec 26, 2007 at 10:47:08AM +0100, Adam Sloboda wrote:
> > and if I echo eject > /proc/acpi/ibm/bay and remove the drive, I then get
> 
> This works for me, maybe you don't have correct libata configuration.
> You can look at mine at http://pastebin.com/f318d583c
> 
> I can't recommend other than SCSI layer based swapping, it was dead
> end for me.

This was pretty much my problem.

ata_piix works great for me, my problems were really just to get rid of
piix (old IDE). In my case because I have two busses, I can actually
unload and reload ata_piix, which is ideal if I don't cleanly remove a
drive or a CD-Rom and wedge the bus.

The current wikis didn't make it clear enough, a lot was outdated and
referring to now old and obsolete kernels.
Considering that I lost more than a day over this, I've made a fair
amount of edits to update the wiki with current info:
http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/How_to_hotswap_UltraBay_devices

Also updated 
http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Problems_with_SATA_and_Linux
to say that ata_piix wasn't a big bad boy that ate all your data in new
kernels anymore

and after updating the first page to say that one shouldn't bother with
lt_hotswap nowadays, unless ata_piix can't be used for some reason (like
an old kernel), I've also added a warning on
http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Lt_hotswap
"The <tt>lt_hotswap</tt> kernel module enables hot-swapping of UltraBay
disk drives under Linux, with DMA support on machines with an old kernel
where you might still be required to use piix+ide-disk. With 2.6.2x or
better, you should use the new driver, ata_pixx with native hotswapping
support."

Hopefully, that'll save the next guy the time and frustration I had to
go through.

Thanks for your help,
Marc
-- 
"A mouse is a device used to point at the xterm you want to type in" - A.S.R.
Microsoft is to operating systems & security ....
                                      .... what McDonalds is to gourmet cooking
Home page: http://marc.merlins.org/