On Wed, 15 Jan 1997, Neil A. Carson wrote:
> On Wed 15 Jan, Philip Blundell wrote:
> > On Wed, 15 Jan 1997, Ben Strawson wrote:
> > 
> > > Would it be possible to work out the necessary Cumana related information
> > > from probing around in the hardware.  I gather that this has been done for
> > > other bits of hardware - is the Cumana more difficult?  OK, you run a
> > > risk of wiping areas of drives connected to the card, but is this
> > > feasible?  I am sure commenting on the feasibility of such a project does
> > > not break the NDA.
> > 
> > I believe it ought to be possible to reverse-engineer the Cumana card and
> > write _some_ sort of a driver, given suitable amounts of time and
> > inclination.  What hardware is on there? 
> > 
> > It wouldn't be all that easy though.
> 
> It uses the sfas216. The problemis not knowing what the hardware is; the problem
> is working out just why the (existing, which functions fine with the same
> controller on another platform) driver keeps hanging; which is significantly
> more complex, though not as complex as writing a driver from scratch.

I think that there are two problems here - one is getting the Cumana
drivers (and the others) working at full speed, the other is trying to get
the NDA lifted from the Cumana card.  Even if the Cumana card's were
running at full speed, I would still like to see the NDA lifted.  Of
course lifting the NDA would I believe help in solving the first problem
of getting the cards working at full speed, since then there would be many
other people who could look at the Cumana code and try and fix it.

Ben.

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Ben Strawson                                            b.strawson@cs.ucl.ac.uk
Department of Computer Science
University College London           http://www.cs.ucl.ac.uk/students/b.strawson
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