IDE hotswap

[Marc SCHAEFER]

I would like to implement real hotswapping support with IDE drives in the
following setup:

   Asus A7V motherboard (has 2 standard IDE bus, and 2 additional bus)
   cheap/standard hotswap IDE hardware

   00:04.1 IDE interface: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82C586 IDE [Apollo] (rev 10)
   00:11.0 Unknown mass storage controller: Promise Technology, Inc.: Unknown device 0d30 (rev 02)

Simply removing and replacing the disk drive will cause hangs in normal
operation.

I have noticed, by creating a simple boot floppy with IDE modules
(ide_mod, ide_disk, ide_probe_mod), that if you remove ide_probe_mod, 
replace the disk, and reinsert ide_probe_mod, the disk is detected
correctly (geometry, size, etc).

My questions:

   - assuming one-disk-per-bus (ie 4 disks in the above IDE+promise
     configuration), is it at all feasible ?  (ie IDE masters only)

   - should I expect the IDE chips to hardware-fail after a few
     inserts/removes ?

   - would modifying drivers/ide/ide_probe.c to add a new function
     drop_bus(bus_id), scan_bus(bus_id) be a good idea, along with
     a /proc interface from ide_probe.c or another to be developped
     module ?

   - is there already work in progress in the topic ?  or a simpler
     way to do the above ?

The initial case is to assume that inserting/removing must be done in a
software-controlled way.

The next step will be to see if the IDE subsystem can detect a failing
drive / removed drive without warning. Reinsertion could be done by
polling every 30 seconds or manual user intervention. 

Thank you for any comments.