Re: [PATCH] 2.5.8 IDE 36

[Vojtech Pavlik]

On Tue, Apr 16, 2002 at 05:23:11PM +0100, Alan Cox wrote:
> > No, you just need to do the loopback over nbd - you need something to do
> > the byte swapping anyway (ie you can't really use the normal "loop"
> > device: I really just meant the more generic "loop the data back"
> > approach).
> 
> nbd goes via the networking layer and deadlocks if looped. The loop driver
> is also much faster. Partitioned loop doesnt seem hard.

And it'd be very cool for stuff like mounting Bochs disk images and
similar.

> 
> > nbd devices already do partitioning, I'm fairly certain.
> 
> Not when I checked.
> 
> > > the Tivo are examples of that. Interworking requires byteswapping and the
> > > ability to handle byteswapped partition tables.
> > 
> > Note that THAT case is an architecture issue, and should probably be
> > handled by just making the IDE "insw" macro do the byteswapping natively.
> > That way you don't get the current "it can actually corrupt your
> > filesystem on SMP" behaviour.
> 
> Thats still not enough. If you have the ide insw macro then control 
> transfers come out wrong. And to maximise the pain - some Amiga controllers
> are backwards some are not. 
> 	"The use of excessive force has been authorised in the ..."
> 
> And then people stick TiVo disks in their PC's in order to prep them for
> various TiVo hackery.

-- 
Vojtech Pavlik
SuSE Labs