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.
Currently it appears as a "com" port, which is less than useful, and
occasionally generates stray interrupts. "stty -f /dev/tty00 31250 raw"
does enable it to talk to a nearby MIDI device, though.
christos