TESTERS WANTED for ATAng preview 1

The first preview release of ATAng is now available on:

ftp://ftp.deepcore.dk/pub/ATAng

>From the README there:

ATAng preview 1 release

Before these rather radical changes to the ATA driver hits the
tree, here is the opportunity to test them out, give usefull
feedback and for the depending subsytems to adjust to the new
ways of things (burncd & atapicam are good examples).

Now why all these changes suddenly ?

1. Get GIANT out of the ATA driver. This was pretty tedious in the old 
   version (I tried that long ago and found it way too painfull).
   With this new structure it was a walk in the park since handling of 
   ATA commands/requests are now split up in a "queue" part and a 
   "lowlevel" part. This makes the places where locks are needed a lot 
   more obvious to locate, making it easier to implement and maintain.

2. Provide the framework for supporting new ATA controllers that has 
   facilities for chaining commands and HW XOR's etc. This called for
   some radical changes to the basic framework which fitted nicely with
   item 1 above. Most of the hooks needed for "exotic" HW are now present,
   and the next step will be for drivers to use this to get an edge over
   conventional ATA controllers. Promise Inc. has kindly provided HW and 
   documentation for their latests chips that has lots of interesting 
   features that we can now start to use. Much more on this when these
   basic bits has settled..

3. Merge of ATA and ATAPI code. As an effect of the new framework there
   is now a single entrypoint for ATA/ATAPI commands. This will extend
   to userland where it will be possible to issue both ATA and ATAPI
   commands just as before with just ATAPI ones. This will add the
   ability to do all kinds of stuff from userland, like SMART etc,
   however it will also provide a nice way of trashing your system :)
   The code for this is not included in this preview as I still need
   to settle on the API for this.
   
4. During all this lots of bugs and problems in the old code has been 
   found and fixed.

5. The way ATA RAID support works today need to change as well to make
   full use of fx Promise's new chips. This is NOT done yet, in fact
   the ata-raid.? driver is still the same, bugs and all.

To try this out you need to apply the "conf-patch" file to your sys tree
then delete the contents of dev/ata and put the contents of the
ATAng-<timestamp>.tgz in there instead. You might want to include
"device ataraid" in your kernel config file if you use ATA RAID's.
Config & make your kernel as usual.

Now, some things are not completly done yet, some things will not
be done at all and there are bound to be bugs lurking, so use 
protective measures for safe engagement, you have been warned 8)

Constructive feedback as always very welcome!!

Enjoy!

-Søren

-Søren