[LUG.ro] [Warning] Cosas a tener en cuenta, cambio de etch a lenny.

[Gustavo Ulises]

Basicamente, lo que hace es esto,

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/LibAtaForAtaDisks

Back in 2003, Jeff Garzik announced the availability of "a new SCSI
driver." That driver was, in fact, the libata subsystem, which was to
be the foundation for serial ATA support in Linux. In the process,
however, Jeff had thought a bit about supporting the current parallel
ATA (PATA) drives, but that was not really his goal: Advertisement
Note that PATA in my driver is only an afterthought. The main area of
focus, now and in the future, is SATA.
In the last three years, the parallel ATA drives that most of us use
have continued to be driven by the old IDE driver subsystem. Some of
this code dates back to the beginning of Linux; since then it has been
maintained by a substantial list of people, a number of whom are
widely held to have been driven insane by the experience. The current
maintainer, Bartlomiej Zolnierkiewicz, has kept a rather low profile
for some time now; he signed off no patches in either of the 2.6.17 or
upcoming 2.6.18 kernels. Not much has been happening in the IDE area.
That does not mean that things have been quiet in the parallel ATA
area, however. Over the last year or so, Alan Cox has been working to
bring full PATA support into the libata code. The resulting drivers
have been sitting in the -mm tree for a while, but that period is
about to end: the PATA driver set has been queued for merging into
2.6.19.
The stated advantages of the new PATA code are many. The code has been
reworked from the beginning, and is up to current kernel standards.
The use of libata means that these drivers are well integrated with
their SATA cousins, bringing two divergent subsystems back together.
The new drivers support a number of chipsets that the IDE layer
doesn't handle. Error handling has been much improved. Also, according
to Alan's announcement from August, the new drivers feature "active
maintenance and updates" and "more interesting bugs to find and help
fix."
On the other hand, the new PATA drivers are not considered to be ready
for production use yet, and distributors are not expected to enable
them in the near future. The merging into 2.6.19 is intended mainly to
broaden the test base. A completely new disk subsystem is the sort of
thing that one likes to test very well before entrusting it with data
that one wishes to actually keep; that process may go on for a little
while yet. It is also worth noting that the new PATA code also drops
support for some ancient IDE controllers.
The issue that gets everybody's attention, however, is that, as with
all drives handled through libata, PATA drives show up as if they were
SCSI disks, and are named /dev/sd*. Anybody who just switches to the
new drivers without updating /etc/fstab (or using the mount-by-label
feature) is likely to have a rough bootstrap experience. That is an
easy problem to work around, but the use of the SCSI drive namespace
seems to bother some people. What appears to be happening in reality
is that Linux is slowly moving toward having a generic disk subsystem,
where everything can just be called /dev/diskN. All that's left is a
few details and a new set of udev rules to rename the device nodes.
Someday, most of us will be using the new PATA code. But this is not a
process which is expected to go quickly, and there are no plans to
remove or deprecate the existing IDE code:
At this point in time it is premature to discuss or plan the point at
which the old IDE layer would go away. That discussion can start at
the point where everyone is happy that the new libata based layer is
providing better quality and coverage than the old one. Even then
there would be no need to hurry.
So it appears that Linux will have parallel subsystems for parallel
ATA support for some time.