Re: [ppc patch] support SCSI disks

[Hollis Blanchard]

On Oct 3, 2004, at 4:21 AM, Marco Gerards wrote:
> Isn't it possible to make this a bit more generic?  So not iterating
> over only scsi but also over `ide' when it is available, for example?
> That way it is more likely the code will work on other machines as
> well.

A given SCSI device could be either a byte-oriented tape or a 
block-oriented disk. However, I do not believe that the ATA protocol 
allows you to read a single byte, so ATA tape drives must implement 
blocking in the hardware. In other words, it is not possible to have 
both block- and byte-oriented device nodes representing an ATA device. 
That is probably why I have never seen an IDE/ATA "tape" node in a 
device tree.

If a system does turn up later in which some additional searching is 
needed, the problem can be resolved then. For now, my preference is not 
to write and maintain code that isn't needed, as unneeded code can only 
cause bugs.

-Hollis