On Sat, Feb 01, 2003 at 12:24:12AM -0500, Thor Lancelot Simon wrote:

 > 1) Last time I picked one of those update floppies apart, the i960
 >    code on it turned out to be LZW-compressed.  Is RAIDframe really
 >    more than 2MB of object code?

Regardless -- these RAID cards contain the RAID card, thread
scheduler, disk drivers, drivers for the SCSI/ATA controllers,
error logging, and configuration managment *in addition* to
the RAID software.

 > 2) It's just plain *astounding* how inefficient some of those
 >    implementations are.  On hardware with comparable memory bandwidth
 >    and CPU cycles available, *and lacking hardware XOR support*, with
 >    the same disks, RAIDframe is often considerably faster.  I have
 >    never understood how some RAID vendors' firmware can consistently
 >    perform so poorly.

I guess you haven't run RAIDframe on a system with expensive context
switches.

-- 
        -- Jason R. Thorpe <thorpej@wasabisystems.com>