It hadn't occurred to me that PATA/IDE could be so simple to speak. Now I'm excited about the possibility of being able to dump a 25 or 30-year-old IDE drive I have that my USB adapter doesn't want to talk to (via another SATA-to-IDE adapter).

The README says this option relies on the kernel's "ATA framework" (presumably for the protocol/non-interfacing logic?). Is that part of the "talking to a drive" stack very much to have to implement? Or do you know of any existing code for microcontrollers?