Re: ataNG

[David Leimbach <leimy2k@xxxxxxx>]

On Oct 24, 2003, at 1:46 PM, Kip Macy wrote:

> >     I am not opposed to it, *BUT* I have one requirement... that it be
> >     brought in under a new device name and that we keep the existing 
> > ata
> >     driver.
> >
> >     The reason is that while ATAng has new features, especially SATA 
> > support,
> >     that our older driver does not, it also has a lot of problems 
> > (that have
> >     been brought up on the freebsd-current lists), and it is also 
> > still
> >     under some pretty serious development in -current and breakages 
> > are
> >     likely to continue in the forseeable future.
> >
> >     So if you want to bring ATAng in give it a new name and a new 
> > major
> >     device number.  We can add support for the device number in the 
> > boot
> >     code so machines can boot into the new driver, and perhaps 
> > differentiate
> >     the PCI ID's it recognizes to allow both drivers to be resident at
> >     once (or, alternatively, only allow one or the other driver to be
> >     linked into the kernel).
> >
> > 					-Matt
> > 					Matthew Dillon
> > 					<dillon@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
>
> Your approach is quite prudent. I'm not one to advocate destabilizing
> existing systems. Most of the breakage I've seen has been in atapicam
> which wasn't entirely Soren's fault. This is an integral part of the
> system so, before one even advocated its use, it would have to have
> quite a bit of testing on a wide variety of hardware. I am almost all
> SCSI in-house. The only person I know of at the moment with the 
> resources
> to do the testing is Dave Rhodus, so it would largely be contingent on
> his interest.

I've been running it for a little while... If you watch the 
FBSD-current CVS logs
he seems to have been recently tweaking timeout values and such for some
odd hardware he is coming across.

Its a big effort for him no doubt... I don't want to give him more 
grief.  Perhaps
it should wait a while until Søren stabilizes it more?

I can access my SATA disk from FBSD but currently I have linux on it.


Dave
> 				-Kip