Status update

[Daniel Drake]

Hi,

Again sorry that nothing has happened over the last couple of months. I'll be 
getting back to work on this shortly.

Just thought I would update you with my recent thoughts and with what has been 
going on.

One thing which I mentioned before is the similarities between our driver and 
the shuttle_usbat driver present in the kernel. In my more recent work, this 
similarity has been growing. And it will grow, if I can keep the driver 
working at the same time :)
So, the final code will most likely be an extension to the shuttle_usbat 
driver already present in the kernel - theres just no point duplicating the 
code. I'll probably merge the work once I've got the driver in its current 
state feature-complete.

Also, in the recent kernels, a new usb-storage driver has appeared (called 
"ub"). Its marked as low performance, but the code is supposed to be clean and 
good. THe problem with the old usb-storage driver is that it emulates the SCSI 
subsystem infront of a USB/ATAPI backend - we're trying to do less of this 
needless emulation in linux. UB is a more "raw" access driver.
Currently, ub only supports the generic USB mass storage 
specification/protocol, this is no good for our device where everything is 
hidden behind a "vendor specific" transport (hence the need for our own driver 
in the first place).
I haven't looked at the ub code, I haven't even tried it yet. But it may well 
be that at some point, our driver becomes an extension to ub.

Glyn, if we're living near each other and you're ok with it, then it would be 
a great help if you wouldn't mind lending me the device for a week or two. I'd 
have no problem with getting you a CF reader device which already works with 
linux in the meantime. I'd be interested to know what you think, just let me 
get back into the swing of things first :)

Daniel