libata based pata driver instead of ide

[aspnair]

I am using Debian Sid on my Athlon X2 computer with Asus M2N-MX mothereboard with one ide hard disk. This has an Nvidia MCP61 ide controller. Currently the installed debian kernel is 2.6.30-1. I noticed that debian kernel is using amd74xx kernel module for ide. I wanted to try out libata based pata driver which is pata_amd. This module is not even compiled, it is commented out as per /boot/config-2.6.30-1-amd64 So I compiled a custom kernel disabling ide and enabling pata_amd only. Everything is working fine. Now my hard disk is shown as sda instead of hda.

So the question is why debian kernel is still using old ide based drivers instead of the new libata pata drivers? When are they going to support pata drivers

[bugsbunny]

I am using Debian Sid on my Athlon X2 computer with Asus M2N-MX mothereboard with one ide hard disk. This has an Nvidia MCP61 ide controller. Currently the installed debian kernel is 2.6.30-1. I noticed that debian kernel is using amd74xx kernel module for ide. I wanted to try out libata based pata driver which is pata_amd. This module is not even compiled, it is commented out as per /boot/config-2.6.30-1-amd64 So I compiled a custom kernel disabling ide and enabling pata_amd only. Everything is working fine. Now my hard disk is shown as sda instead of hda.

So the question is why debian kernel is still using old ide based drivers instead of the new libata pata drivers? When are they going to support pata drivers

I suspect that they're doing it because too many people get caught up in the hdx to sdx switch and end up with unbootable systems. The solution is to switch to UUID= or LABEL= syntax, in which case it doesn't matter whether the system calls them hdx, sdx, or random-name-of-the-day-x. But most people haven't done that.

[aspnair]

thanks bugsbunny.
I feel at least they should give an option to use libata in sid because that is the unstable version.
When I switched to pata driver I found that there are places apart from /etc/fstab where hdx or sdx could be hard coded. for example, /boot/grub/device.map. I tried using /dev/disk/by-id/ata-SAMSUNG_SP1614N_S016J10XA40667 in that so that I could do "upgrade-grub" when using both kernels.