gibbs@freefall.FReebsd.ORG (Justin T. Gibbs) wrote:

>Adaptec is no saint, but their attitude is much the same as with NCR.
[...]
>They will give you all the documentation to
>write your own HIM layer (basically what John Aycock and myself have done
>for the aic7xxx cards and Stephan Esser has done for the NCR).  Neither
>driver was reversed engineered, they were just more difficult to write.

>As for Buslogic, their cards (until the Flashpoint) do not use downloaded 
>firmware so the driver can use a well defined, high level, interface to the 
>card. This is just the same way the 1542 and 1742 cards were designed, and 
>since both Buslogic and Adaptec can give free software driver writers the 
>information to talk to that high-level interface without exposing their 
>"trade secrets" in the firmware, they do so.

Sorry, I didn't get it. Do the Buslogic cards have some kind of
OS-independent abstraction layer over the hardware? Or is it just the
hardware that is so simple that no effort needs to be taken to hide the
details?

Thanks
	Martin
-- 
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
Martin Cracauer <cracauer@wavehh.hanse.de>  -  BSD User Group Hamburg
BSD, Lisp and other programming info http://www.bik-gmbh.de/~cracauer