Luciano A. Stertz wrote:

    Just trying to understand the SATA SMART problem as a whole. With 
your patch, it's possible to send ATA commands that are encapsulated in 
CDBs, right? If so, to enable sending direct ATA commands to a SATA 
device, one has to create a ioctl that receives the command and creates 
a CDB from it, as John Linville did a few weeks ago. This way a 
user-space application (e.g. smartmontools) can use this ioctl to send 
ATA commands. Am I right?

No.  SCSI "send CDB" ioctls have existed for years.

The ioctls John added are merely for compatibility with existing IDE 
utilities.

    If I understand it correctly, the kernel receives an ATA command, 
creates a CDB, gets the ATA command from the CDB and issues it.
    It's a nice workaround, but user space software will still have to 
be aware that the target device appears as SCSI but isn't in fact a SCSI 
device... I guess that the ideal situation would be:

The SAT INQUIRY draft follows the standard that I (libata) set:  the 
vendor id is "ATA".

	Jeff