[ On Tuesday, March 12, 2002 at 21:24:30 (+0100), Frank van der Linden wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: AIC-7899 & RAIDFrame SCSI problems in 1.5.2
>
> On Tue, Mar 12, 2002 at 02:20:05PM -0500, Greg A. Woods wrote:
> > It not only doesn't do Ultra-160 mode -- it doesn't work well at all
> > with some Ultra-160 drives, as I and others have shown.
> 
> It's not that bad. I have seen 3 reports of problems, but
> also a large number of successful uses (I use it on three
> machines with 789x controllers without a hitch).

I've been trying to confirm that any of the successes have indeed been
with multiple Ultra-160 LVD drives.  So far it seems at least one such
indication of success proved to be with one or more lesser drives.

> Actually, the driver in FreeBSD hasn't had any serious commits in
> 6 months now.

Ah!  I haven't looked at it in that long!  ;-)

But this is very good news -- it suggests the current version is quite
stable (and my own use of it confirms that for at least one setup).

> But sure, we need to update ours. The main problem
> will always be that we never got any docs for the thing, even
> though we begged Adaptec. Porting the newer version will help
> there, since it'll make pulling over fixes a lot easier.

Justin Gibbs seems to have a very good handle on how to talk to those
chips.  Do you know if he was able to get docs from Adaptec?

> The effort would be to get to know scsipi(9) a little, it should not
> be much work. But I won't be doing it anytime soon.

I just realised that even if I found the time to do that learning and to
do the re-port, I don't have any hardware to do it with anyway -- all
the machines I did the initial testing on are now in production at a
client site.....  I personally can't afford my own STL-2 or similar
system at the moment, even though I'd really like one, and I don't
really want another PCI adapter board, nor do I have any appropriate
disks for testing anyway.

-- 
								Greg A. Woods

+1 416 218-0098;  <gwoods@acm.org>;  <g.a.woods@ieee.org>;  <woods@robohack.ca>
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