Hello there. It is a PCI card with what looks like individual IDE
ports for each drive and some sort of caching on-board. The Linux
support is provided in the form of a kernel patch (which I would be
HAPPY to send along, it's only about 50k) and two pieces of
software--a client and a server. Both software pieces look like closed
source. I tried to get them to send me some tarballs of
*something*--documentation, anything, but I've yet to hear from their
development team.

The server sits as a daemon chunk of software on the RAIDZone host and
accepts connections from clients.

The client software is a sort of disk-manager hybrid..  you can
designate hot spares, create RAID drives, change the RAID types, and
so forth..  I'll have to play with it a bit more to see more of the
functionality.

The kernel patch looks like it just adds some special RAID
functionality and a few device drivers (/dev/rza2, /dev/rza1, etc).

I will concoct a boot disk and get the dmesg output from a netbsd boot
kernel in a future message since the machine hasn't gone live and I
can do pretty much whatever I want with it for the next few days.

I will also see what happens with the pciide driver you mentioned..
dmesg here I come!

ttyl,

Marc

On Thu, 13 Jul 2000, Andrew Gillham wrote:

> Date: Thu, 13 Jul 2000 17:49:02 -0400 (EDT)
> From: Andrew Gillham <gillhaa@ghost.whirlpool.com>
> To: Andrew Gillham <gillhaa@ghost.whirlpool.com>
> Cc: sudog@sudog.com, netbsd-help@netbsd.org
> Subject: Re: Looking for NetBSD support for RAIDZone
> 
> Myself (Andrew Gillham) writes:
> > 
> > What kind of controller card do they use?  How is it supported under Linux?
> > I don't see any drivers available for download or very much technical
> > documentation.
> > 
> > Sounds like the controller board or "switch" is proprietary so hopefully
> > they have some sort of docs available. :-)
> 
> Ok, after finding a couple of other hits, it almost sounds like these things
> are just implemented as PCI bridges with each drive getting it's own IDE
> controller, then using software RAID on top of that.  I may be totally wrong
> here though. :-)
> 
> If that is the case, it _might_ not be so difficult to get working provided
> the IDE controllers are compatible with "normal" pciide type controllers.
> 
> If you can, boot a NetBSD kernel and provide the dmesg output.
> 
> -Andrew
> -- 
> -----------------------------------------------------------------
> Andrew Gillham                            | NetBSD ist Affengeil.
> gillham@whirlpool.com                     | Nachts ist es kaelter
> I speak for myself, not for my employer.  | als draussen.
>