Jeff Garzik posted a two patch series introducing an asynchronous event notification infrastructure, "enabling SATA Asynchronous Notification ('AN') for CD/DVD devices that support it." He summarized:

"For devices that support SATA AN (only very recent ones do), this means that HAL and other userspace utilities no longer need to repeatedly poll the CD/DVD device to determine if the user has changed the media."

The first patch is for the SCSI driver and is based on work originally done by Kristen Carlson Accardi, along with "copious input from James Bottomley". The second patch updates libata to utilize the new SCSI event infrastructure.

Alan Cox posted an updated LibATA PATA (IDE) status report on the lkml. Improved from a previous status report [story] he noted, "current kernels now support HPA (Host Protected Area) but default to honouring it. Probably a wrong default for PATA but we need to decide the right way to expose it nicely." He went on to note, "no PATA hotplug support yet. Need warmplug helpers for some chipsets (eg some intel ICH) to avoid risk of hangs."

Later in the report he listed around 40 chipsets describing LibATA's PATA support for each, ranging from "rock solid" for ATIIXP and "solid" for AMD, TRIFLEX, MARVELL, MPIIX, OLDPIIX, NETCELL, RZ1000, SERVERWORKS, SIL680, and VIA, to "still experimental" for NS87410 and "no idea" for IT8213. When asked about support for PowerPC drivers, Alan replied, "I'm not aware of anyone having done any PPC ports yet, although a couple of people have asked and said they would look at it. Currently our coverage is incomplete for some embedded and obscure platforms, of which the macintrash is probably the least 'obscure'."