Re: IDE hot-swap kernel support

[Andre Hedrick]

If you want empty bays at boot, then there needs to be code that handles
the exception. You yank a device out of some hosts and boot and the host
is never loaded.  You are now talking about a re-init process to wake-up
and INT19 hook some the the add-on cards with BIOS to the Mainboard BIOS.
That will get UGLY.

On Fri, 30 Jun 2000, Andrzej Krzysztofowicz wrote:

> > 
> > The problem comes when I swap drives.  A BLKRRPART causes it to read
> > the new partition, and the new drive works.  However, it does not read
> > the new drive geometry, so fdisk gets rather confused.  Switching from
> > a small HDD to large one and accessing the end of the large drive
> > *seems* to work.  Another problem is that if the system is booted with
> > no disk in the bay I can't get it to recognize a disk which is
> > inserted later.
> > 
> > It seems to me that what I need is a way to stimulate the ide driver
> > to reprobe for a drives on an ide bus.  From looking at
> > linux/drivers/ide-probe.c, I don't see any way to manually trigger a
> > probe.  Perhaps one should be added - 'echo 1 > /proc/ide/ide1/reprobe'?
> > Or even 'echo slave > /proc/ide/ide1/reprobe'?
> 
> There's an ioctl() already in ide.c - HDIO_SCAN_HWIF.
> 
> Unfortunately it is not stable enough and have some other limitaions.
> Maybe /proc interface would be better for that... Andre ?
> 
> > Thoughts?
> 
> --
> =======================================================================
>   Andrzej M. Krzysztofowicz               [e-mail]
>   phone [phone]
> Faculty of Applied Phys. & Math.,   Technical University of Gdansk
> 

Andre Hedrick
The Linux ATA/IDE guy