On Mer, 2005-09-21 at 17:15 +0100, Richard Purdie wrote:

As ide_cs only creates the block devices when a card is present, I think
it shouldn't be set as removable. As a point of reference, the MMC
system does not set the removable flag for exactly this reason (There is
an email from Russell King explaining this -
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/1/8/165).

I can't comment on the MMC layer or its core requirements as I don't
know them well. IDE PCMCIA does however encompass removal devices. The
removable flag is set so that we get removable media behaviour - that is
the media can change under us and we must not cache partition data. The
current behavioiur in that sense is correct.

It is worth noting the MMC subsystem works with my evil udev script. If
I apply the patch below (which removes the removable flag for flash
devices), I don't see this loop.

But does MMC have a media change detect, and if not does the right thing
occur if you swap cards with partition tables ?

1. Can anyone provide details on what the bits in id->config really
mean?  

ATA standards are all available for download.

2. Which other drivers exploit the "if (id->config & (1<<7))
drive->removable = 1;" code? Is it just ide_cs?

It might be currently because the old IDE layer has no hotplug support
(not even for PCMCIA - it happens to work some days) but that wasn't
true in 2.4-ac or some 2.6-ac.

It sounds like something needs to be smarter about whether the media has
changed - could be kernel but it seems like a user space problem. I note
that the standard Gnome tools "just work" in this case so perhaps you
can see how they do it.

Alan