Hey! How can I intercept and analyze any kind of (IDE) hard disk communication in linux? And I don't mean those little disk monitors that only show you reads/writes. I mean any kind of traffic... disk reads, writes, commands for disk spinup and spindown, HDD head seek and parking commands, anything and everything!

Since you're using Linux, you can always look at the source code for the IDE drivers, and get everything you need from it...

I assume this will require me to recompile the kernel with the new IDE drivers. What methods would you recommend to be added to the driver in order to be able to monitor the traffic from userspace?

Maybe, but as a first step, I'd look at the code. There could very well be hooks in place right now, to allow user-space monitoring. You'd just have to write a program to look at them.

Hmm, kernel hooks... thanks for pointing that out to me, I was originally leaning towards printk() function. Well basically I'm trying to do something I've never done before (first time kernel hacking), and I'm definitely expected to run into trouble. I took a brief look at the drivers/ide, and drivers/ata directories of the kernel source tree, and there are indeed a lot of files in here to check out. Any suggestions which could be of interest? I'm guessing all those that begin on "ide-" and are potential candidates.

My disk model: ST94011A

EDIT: 2.6.30.5

Moved to linux-Kernel