Hot swap IDE in Fedora Core 1

[Keith Lofstrom]

The new Fedora Core 1 (kernel 2.4.22-1.2088.nptl) has Alan Cox's new
IDE hotswap mods.  This means that, if you have the right chipset, you
can now hotswap drives IDE on a running system:

Alan Cox wrote:
---------------------------------------
> Providing the hw supports it (and if software bits are needed and
> present) then
>
> hdparm -b0 /dev/hdfoo
> remove
> swap
> hdparm -b1 /dev/hdfoo
>
> Note that IDE hotswap (from the physical layer itself) doesn't support
> master and slave operation with hotswap (1 drive per cable only). Also
> doing it with a controller that doesn't support hotswap, or not following
> the controller manual rules about order of power and control cable
> insertion can be expensive.
---------------------------------------

You will of course need to unmount and mount the file systems before and
after, and you will need an IDE chipset that works with the driver, and
you will need a proper hotswap cage with a proper power controller, and,
and, ...

I am using a Promise TX133 board, rebranded as a Maxtor ATA-133, with 
SanMax InClose ATA-133 cages, and it seems to work fine.  The ViPower
cages also work.   After I get my server converted to Fedora Core this
weekend, I can toss out all the balky slow USB2 stuff that I used to
do this with.  

More on how I do backups with hotswap IDE drives and dirvish/rsync is on:

http://www.keithl.com/linuxbackup.html

Keith

-- 
Keith Lofstrom           keithl at ieee.org         Voice (503)-520-1993
KLIC --- Keith Lofstrom Integrated Circuits --- "Your Ideas in Silicon"
Design Contracting in Bipolar and CMOS - Analog, Digital, and Scan ICs