On 01/25/2011 05:16 PM, Randy Dunlap wrote:

On Tue, 25 Jan 2011 17:10:49 -0500 Mark Lord wrote:

quoted

On 11-01-25 12:05 PM, Ahmed S. Darwish wrote:

quoted

My current x86 laptop includes the very common ATA PIIX controller.

ata_piix is just about ideal for this sort of thing.

Except, don't use the BIOS to write the logs,
but rather code/use a very simple set of polling-PIO
functions to talk directly through the PIIX to the drive.

Really really simple code to do that, and it would likely
work with anything ata-piix, and most other non-AHCI chipsets too.

Not perfect, but probably good enough for a lot of scenarios.
The old hd.c driver shows how to read/write a sector at a time,
and that kind of code is easily converted to simply poll for completion.

I don't know how/where to find it, but Rusty Russell had a version of this
many, many years ago.

You beat me to the reply :)

http://lwn.net/Articles/9905/

but IIRC there were updates and improvements.