Re: arcmsr(4) and SAS

[Thor Lancelot Simon <tls%panix.com@localhost>]

On Wed, Mar 05, 2014 at 03:52:33PM +0000, Emmanuel Dreyfus wrote:
> 
> But no disk connected to the controller will attach. The Linux driver
> does not seems to treat SATA and SAS models very differently. Is there 
> anything particular to NetBSD when it comes to SAS? I see in the man page
> that some other ARCEA SAS board are supported by NetBSD.

Have a look at the FreeBSD driver.  It has (last I looked, anyway)
an idea of card type: "A", "B", "C", "D", and maybe even "E".  In
almost every routine in the driver, right at the head there's a
switch statement that calls the per-card-type routine.

This is obviously a pretty awful way to do it -- the devices are
clearly not that different from each other since we work fine with
several of their "types" using a single driver without all those
conditionals, and where they *are* that different, it would be far
better to use multiple drivers that call the common code kept in a
separate source file -- but by examining the code for the newer
types in that driver you can probably see what the differences
are, and then decide how hard it would be to fix.

I don't believe there's anything particularly different about the
SAS cards compared to the SATA cards; but I don't believe our
driver currently works with any cards newer than the 16xx.  The
18xx and 13xx are both too new, I believe.

Thor