Linux may remove the legacy IDE driver support
According to the mailing list, Linux may remove the legacy IDE driver support. If the proposal goes according to plan, starting from Linux 5.13, there will be no IDE driver support for related code. In fact, these legacy IDE driver codes were deprecated two years ago and were marked to be deleted in 2021. Currently, Christoph Hellwig is following up on the removal plan.
It should be noted that only the legacy IDE driver support is removed this time. Since many users still use IDE devices on some old devices, in the current Linux kernel version, IDE support itself can still be obtained through the libata layer. For the Linux kernel, it has relied on the libata layer for better support for nearly 20 years, so the libata code will be retained, while the previous IDE driver support will be removed.
Although there may still be some niche traditional hardware platforms that still use the legacy IDE drivers, removing it can reduce more than 41,000 lines of code for the Linux kernel and allow more cleanup at the block layer of the Linux kernel.
