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Linus Says Pre-2.6 is Coming
gomoX writes "As seen on C|Net , Linus has announced that the pre-2.6 series will be starting in early July. Despite not having been able to meet the release goal for 2.6 in June 2003, the next stable version is not as far away as you may think. You can take your guess based on the fact there was a 9 month period between first test version of 2.4 and the official release of 2.4.0 on January 2001."
I think it is safe to say nobody knows if Reiser4 will go into the stock 2.6 kernel, but I think the principals would like it to happen, and depending on how well the Reiser4 beta performs this summer, it should be possible, as long as it does not appear that adding the Reiser4 code would disrupt existing code.
LarryYou are correct in assuming you don't need ide-scsi to emulate a SCSI host for burning cdroms in 2.6, but it has nothing at all to do with the IDE rewrite.
2.6 has support for queueing "generic scsi" commands through the block layer, using the same mechanism and transport as the regular read/write file system requests. So we can overload the sg (scsi generic) SG_IO and provide the same functionality for non-scsi attached devices (such as atapi burners). With a recent cdrecord, you can give the device with -dev=/dev/hdc for instance.
Additionally, cd burning is now zero copy. The user space data buffer is mapped directly into the kernel for the dma operations. DMA is supported on a 4-byte boundary, where 2.4 and previous has required sector alignment (512 bytes) for any atapi dma operations.