GitLab

hdparm explicitely marks HDIO_[UNREGISTER,SCAN]_HWIF ioctls as DANGEROUS
and given the number of bugs we can assume that there are no real users:

* DMA has no chance of working because DMA resources are released by
  ide_unregister() and they are never allocated again.

* Since ide_init_hwif_ports() is used for ->io_ports[] setup the ioctls
  don't work for almost all hosts with "non-standard" (== non ISA-like)
  layout of IDE taskfile registers (there is a lot of such host drivers).

* ide_port_init_devices() is not called when probing IDE devices so:
  - drive->autotune is never set and IDE host/devices are not programmed
    for the correct PIO/DMA transfer modes (=> possible data corruption)
  - host specific I/O 32-bit and IRQ unmasking settings are not applied
    (=> possible data corruption)
  - host specific ->port_init_devs method is not called (=> no luck with
    ht6560b, qd65xx and opti621 host drivers)

* ->rw_disk met...