Laptop-Hotswap 0.3.6 review

Laptop-Hotswap kernel module enables hot-swapping for disk drives with full DMA support under Linux

License: GPL (GNU General Public License) File size: 0K Developer: Jim Duchek

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Laptop-Hotswap kernel module enables hot-swapping for disk drives with full DMA support under Linux. It requires kernel 2.6.15+ and ACPI.

I think it ought to work on just about any laptop, although I'm not as familiar with ACPI as I'd like to be. It works fine on my T22. There could be issues with laptops with two expansion bays -- I shut down the entire ide1 interface and fire it back up, and I do all my watching on the ACPI device for the IDE1/Master. So if you had a slave device, and you ejected the master, your slave will go bye-bye. Thinking about ways around that, but they don't export too much of the ide driver. I think it'd be easy to handle, you just have to make sure you're not using either master or slave whenever you eject one of them.

At least on my laptop, don't go pulling things while your laptop is sleeping. Do it when it's awake.

The floppy support 'should' work, but my floppy drive isn't with me right now.

There's one parameter -- auto_eject. If you set it to 1, the driver will automatically shut down and unregister the IDE interface upon getting a request for ejection (On my T22, I pull a little switch and a lever pops out -- the drive is still connected at that point, but it shows as a request for ejection). If your laptop doesn't have a mechanism for that:

echo -n "MSTR eject" > /proc/acpi/lths

Will shut down and software-eject the drive, and you can safely pull it and insert another.

See the scripts in config/ -- they're made to work with acpid to handle the ejection and umounting and insertion. The mount/umount stuff only matters for a drive caddy, I suppose.

It shouldn't matter what you have in your laptop at boot. This module also fixes that annoying thing on my T22 where if I don't have a ultrabay battery in at boot, I can't ever see it's status.

What's New in This Release:
Support for the Fujitsu S7020 (and possibly other laptops using a PATA 'bay' with an SATA main disk).