http://mail-index.netbsd.org/tech-kern/2003/09/25/0006.html
This adds a device (atabus) between IDE controllers and wd or atapibus, to
have each ATA channel show up in the device tree. Later there will be atabus
devices in /dev, so that we can do IOCTL on them.
Each atabus has its own kernel thread, to handle operations that needs polling,
e.g. reset and others.
Device probing on each bus it defered to the atabus thread creation.
This allows to do the reset and basic device probes in parallel, which reduce
boot time on systems with several pciide controllers.
most polling.
2) Clean up some goofiness in pciide -- get rid of the whole "candisable" path
(it's gratuitous) and simplify the code by calling pciide_map_compat_intr(),
*_set_modes() and wdc_print_modes() from central locations.
3) Add a register writability and register ghost test to eliminate phantom
drives more quickly.
bjh21