Re: Can not get PATA to work for Compact Flash with 2.6.28 kernel

I use a San Disk compact flash (CF) card on a board with MPC8248
processor. The CF is connected to data and address bus of the processor
and operates in TRUE IDE mode. The registers are memory mapped. I can
read the file system on the CF in u-boot (1.3.4). U-boot can identify
the CF and mount file system correctly.

<snip>

I have just gone through solving a problem that sounds very similar
(using several flash cards).
We also have a flash card wired up in true IDE mode.  The problem that
I ran into is that any time the Interrupt Enable (bit 1) or Software
Reset(bit 2) bits were set in the control register, the flash would
show an error in the status register (bit 0), and was not recoverable
except by toggling the power to the card.
To work around this, write a driver based on the PATA driver, but
replace (or at least examine) each and every element of the
ata_port_operations struct you are using, replacing any function which
soft resets or enables interrupts.

ata_host_alloc: ENTER
ata_port_alloc: ENTER
__ata_port_freeze: ata4294967295 port frozen
scsi0 : pata_platform
ata1: PATA max PIO3 no IRQ, using PIO polling mmio cmd 0x30000000 ctl
0x40000000
ata_host_register: probe begin
ata_port_schedule_eh: port EH scheduled
ata_scsi_error: ENTER
ata_port_flush_task: ENTER
ata_eh_link_autopsy: ENTER
ata_eh_recover: ENTER
__ata_port_freeze: ata1 port frozen
ata_sff_softreset: ENTER
ata_sff_softreset: about to softreset, devmask=0
ata_bus_softreset: ata1: bus reset via SRST
ata_sff_softreset: EXIT, classes[0]=9 [1]=9
ata_eh_thaw_port: ata1 port thawed
ata_std_postreset: ENTER
ata_std_postreset: EXIT
ata_sff_postreset: EXIT, no device
ata_eh_revalidate_and_attach: ENTER
ata_eh_recover: EXIT, rc=0
ata_scsi_error: EXIT

The above sequence of ATA calls you are seeing is essentially
identical to what I ran into -- part of the registration attempted to
either enable interrupts or soft reset the card, the error bit stuck
high, and everything went downhill from there.
Hope that helps.

-Aaron Pace