Legacy IDE Driver Now Deprecated, To Be Removed From Linux In 2021
Christoph Hellwig and David Miller went ahead with officially deprecating the legacy IDE driver in the Linux kernel. With Linux 5.2+, a warning will now be emitted on registering IDE hosts using this driver over the deprecation.
Before getting too emotional over your ribbon cables, this is not the removal of IDE support from the Linux kernel. Rather, this is only about the legacy IDE driver. IDE hardware support will remain available in the Linux kernel via the libata layer. The Linux kernel for years has used libATA as its preferred library for supporting ATA controllers and devices. There are libata-based drivers for all the popular hardware of the time while it's just the previous legacy IDE driver that is set to be removed from the kernel in two years time.
Most Linux distributions transitioned to libata-based storage drivers more than a decade ago (e.g. Ubuntu back in 2006). Chances are for any systems out there still using the legacy IDE driver, they aren't being routinely updated anyhow for new kernel/software releases and given the age of the hardware is likely running into other software support issues with today's Linux/open-source software requirements. So it's approaching the end of an era but not that many people will be directly impacted, if you are still using IDE drives chances are there is libata-based driver support available. So the legacy IDE driver is now deprecated.
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