Legacy IDE Driver Now Deprecated, To Be Removed From Linux In 2021

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Legacy IDE Driver Now Deprecated, To Be Removed From Linux In 2021

The Linux kernel's legacy IDE driver has been officially deprecated as of Linux 5.2 and is expected to be removed entirely in 2021...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Linux-Legacy-IDE-Deprecated

[rene]

I actually tested the libata PATA IDE drivers on my vintage YT video fun series recently, and they mostly all worked, except I could not figure out any fallback solution to bind them to the legacy PIO mode IDE ports in case no matching native bus-master DMA driver was available. Maybe that tiny little nitpick could be solved until then for the best experience on such 386 system ;-) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=afwIZDtrRj4

[skeetre]

Man... I thought when I saw the headline they were removing the IDE drivers totally. I just used an old ide zip drive the other day, and was thinking even if they did remove it, 2 years from now, probably about time. Then saw that it was just the older legacy driver and was like, what the crap why haven't they removed it already!?

[DanL]

(i.e. Ubuntu back in 2006)

I think you meant e.g.

https://www.grammarly.com/blog/know-your-latin-i-e-vs-e-g/

[starshipeleven]

Then saw that it was just the older legacy driver and was like, what the crap why haven't they removed it already!?

Hardware using IDE is still supported by the kernel.

I'd be personally annoyed by losing the IDE driver as I need it for ancient x86 (Geode) networking stuff running up-to-date OpenWrt, namely Pc Engines Alix boards. They run the CompactFlash card (with the device OS/firmware) over native IDE.

It's still mostly fine for normal networking and firewall usage, PBX and such.

[Adarion]

Glad to see IDE is still supported. As long as the new stack supports all the hardware it should be okay.
I remember that I had troubles with some SIS chipset, initialization took way too long, the kernel tried and tried until it finally reached PIO 0 and worked. The HW is well capable of UDMA. The previous kernel from some ThinClient solution that was installed booted flawless and within seconds.
Maybe I should check that again and possibly report a bug.

[thunderbird32]

I'm not especially effected by this, as I tend to run NetBSD on my older systems (though I tend to run SCSI on those anyway), rather than Linux. That said, it's nice to see they are maintaining some level of IDE support.

[rastersoft]

I actually tested the libata PATA IDE drivers on my vintage YT video fun series recently, and they mostly all worked, except I could not figure out any fallback solution to bind them to the legacy PIO mode IDE ports in case no matching native bus-master DMA driver was available. Maybe that tiny little nitpick could be solved until then for the best experience on such 386 system ;-) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=afwIZDtrRj4

But, AFAIK, a 486 at least is needed for current kernels... At least, I remember having read some time ago that they started to use some 486-specific instructions that simplified creating semaphores and other IPC systems...

[skeetre]

I'd be personally annoyed by losing the IDE driver as I need it for ancient x86 (Geode) networking stuff running up-to-date OpenWrt, namely Pc Engines Alix boards. They run the CompactFlash card (with the device OS/firmware) over native IDE.

Annoyed about losing the legacy IDE driver, or annoyed about losing IDE totally? Is the native IDE the legacy? I'm saying they could do away with the legacy IDE driver as monraaf said,

It's actually rather easy to port old IDE drivers over to libata, even the drivers for Amiga, Atari and 68k Mac hardware have already been ported with very little effort.

Why wait 2 more years? If you don't want to lose IDE drivers, just don't update the kernel on those systems.

Kind of like, why are we still using so many 32-bit systems and libraries? Should have totally switched to 64-bit years ago.

[Azrael5]

Excellent, I'm waiting for x86 32bit operating system be deprecated.