[haiku] Re: GSoC 2009 -- some more TODO, requesting help.

  • From: "Axel Dörfler" <axeld@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: haiku@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Thu, 12 Mar 2009 11:19:34 +0100 CET

Ryan Leavengood <leavengood@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 11, 2009 at 4:38 AM, Axel Dörfler <axeld@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> > wrote:
> > I guess it will end up on my plate eventually, I just hesitate to 
> > take
> > it over so that someone can still beat me doing so ;-)
> The ata bus manager is more or less way outside my area of expertise
> right now, but obviously one cannot grow unless one challenges
> oneself.
> 
> So if I or someone else was considering this, where should we start
> research? There is the code of course, but what about documentation
> for the ATA standard, etc.?

The T13 committee is responsible for maintaining ATA, see:
http://www.t13.org/Standards/Default.aspx?DocumentType=3&DocumentStage=2

Also, looking at FreeBSD and Linux has proven to be a good idea when 
trying to get some generic hardware interface to work -- many devices 
need extra care to work as they don't manage to fulfill the specs 
perfectly. Also for the general design, it doesn't hurt to look 
somewhere else, too.
Often, FreeBSD manages to provide the cleaner/simpler/easier solution 
to a problem, while Linux contains more special cases for specific 
hardware.

> And what is the recommended development
> approach? Could it be done initially on VMware?

Definitely. Start with the emulators, and when it runs well there, get 
to the real hardware, and test, test, test :-)

I guess I would first start in getting ATAPI support back to work, 
possibly by porting the solution in the old IDE driver - AFAIK this one 
didn't cause too many problems yet. But one should still make sure 
everything was done correctly, comparing with the ATAPI standard and 
other implementations.
Then I would work towards getting interrupts working again.

Marcus might also have some insights on the matter, I guess :-)

If someone starts working on this, please give us a note, and also, if 
it doesn't work out :-)

Bye,
   Axel.

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