Re: Updated SATA support patches for Intel ICH & Promise cards

Joe Rhett wrote:
> Just so you know, you're singing to the choir here.  I think everyone
> realizes that its going to take coordination.   But Soren didn't say
> "whoah, let's try this a different way" he went directly to "you're wasting
> my time" without even a basic attempt to consolidate the efforts.

I dont recall using those words, neither does my mail archive.

So now that we are wasting our time on this lets gets things straight.

On april 3rd Doug posted a patch to solve some of the ich problems on 
-current. I responded with a couble of questions and some of the stuff 
in there was fixed (differently or correctly depending on your view) in 
-current back when. Then time passed, I got access to Intel HW here, and 
then this patch shows up. I tell Doug that it conflicts with the work 
I've been doing to get the Intel parts flying, but that the RAID 
metadata code he talks about would be welcomed (but thats not in the 
patch at hand mind you). Then all hell breaks loose...

Now, since I'm working on getting *ALL* SATA controllers working 
properly (not just Intel) and getting error/status info from them (which 
is pretty much ignored currently), I have to take a more general look at 
things, and have devised a scheme and implemented most of it already. 
This scheme doesn't fit with Doug's work, but parts of it is semilar in 
functionality for the Intel parts (surprise).

Maybe I should spend more time publishing whats going on here about ATA 
but until now I've prefered to use whatever time and resources I have to 
make things happend instead. And frankly I havn't noticed any interest 
in this from anyone, except when things break I get plenty of nagging 
emails telling me so. Time is a precious resource these days and having 
to deal with situations like this doesn't help motivation either.

So, for those *really* interested in ATA work and I mean interested in 
the sense of spending hours on it every day or at least on a very 
regular basis, lets talk about it off the lists. The project needs one 
to take on doing ATA maintenance on -stable, which would be a fine 
introduction to doing ATA work that could make a difference....

That said, I'll still take my position as ATA developer/maintainer up to 
revision, it takes *ALOT* of my time, and frankly it hasn't been anyway 
near as fun lately as it used to be...

> On Tue, May 04, 2004 at 07:15:15PM -0500, Mark Linimon wrote:
> 
>>>It sounds very much like you're putting your ego far, far in front
>>>of functional code.
>>
>>I think you should go back and read the history of the work that
>>Soren has done before you criticize him.  I am not at all surprised
>>that he has a large number of patches in the queue due to the amount
>>of work that he puts in on ATA (mostly unheralded).
>>
>>There is certainly plenty of work to go around in this area, but
>>no doubt needs careful coordination due to the complexity of the
>>work involved -- it has seemed, in the past, that seemingly-trivial
>>changes break old, brain-damaged, ATA hardware.
>>
>>Please, folks, let's try to work together on these really hard
>>problems, and respect that fact that coordinating lots of changes
>>are always going to require extra work -- but it will get FreeBSD
>>a lot further along towards its goals in the long run.
>>
>>mcl
> 
> 


-- 
-Søren