Hi !

On Tue, 1 Apr 2003, Christopher Tribo wrote:
> 	That actually sounds pretty neat, like the cache on a RAID
> card / DAE. Sounds like it would help out a lot with many small files,
> i.e. our CVS repository. Especially vs. synchronous FFS.

It's no magic, but it's quite funny. I tried this prestoserve stuff on my
DECsystem 5500, which has such NVRAM built onto the CPU board. As soon as i
find the time to port NetBSD on it (which currently could take a long while due
to my load :), i will also have a look into this prestoserve issue. I also have
one of these DECstation Prestoserve Boards lying around waiting for support.

In Ultrix, the Prestoserve driver sits somewhere between the disk and the
filesystem, and so support should be able to integrate without conflicting with
the other platforms. Maybe the way RAIDframe sits between real disks and the
RAID devices, we could also create a device, which can be connected to a
physical device on one side, and be used as several device nodes on the other
side.

The other way would be a direct manipulation of the SCSI device drivers, which
is not the optimal way, as we need this for just 1-2 platforms, it would just
help to boot off such a device, which is not so easy if we use some kind of
pseudodevices for the root-fs. Or we just leave the root-fs uncached :)

...Michael

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