On Sun, 5 Nov 1995, Perry E. Metzger wrote:
> Rahim Azizarab writes:
> > How about a somewhat stable driver for a ncr controller? I keep getting a lot
> > of time outs, and assertion command failed in ncr.c.  This happens on both
> > netBSD and freeBSD.  With linux this problem doesn't happen.
> 
> It doesn't happen to me with Thor's patched NCR driver from a while
> back -- everything in it is totally stable -- but since the 1.1Alpha
> NCR driver won't work at all on my machine I haven't had a chance to
> beat on the new NCR driver in the tree to test it.

I got the assertion failures with the old old NCR driver from NetBSD-1.0, 
but ever since upgrading to netbsd-current, the driver seems to be pretty 
stable. I'm using a 100 MHz Pentium, Quantum Capella VP32210 disk, and 
a Toshiba XM-5301 CDROM. I do remember someone saying that the NCR driver
had a lot of trouble with fast drives (like the Quantum Grand Prix), but 
that problem may have been fixed by now.

The only problem I've noticed with the NCR driver is pretty minor... when 
it prints the list of devices on the SCSI bus during the kernel boot, it 
claims that my CD-ROM drive is empty, even when it's not:

ncr0 targ 2 lun 0: <TOSHIBA, CD-ROM XM-5301TA, 1895> SCSI2 5/cdrom removable
cd0 at scsibus0cd0(ncr0:2:0): asynchronous.
: drive empty

The NCR driver that came with NetBSD-1.0 was able to detect whether or not
a disc was in the drive... I remember reading about this problem on this 
mailing list, so I guess I should check the netbsd-current archives :)