On 15.03.2011, at 10:03, Stefan Hajnoczi wrote:

> On Tue, Mar 15, 2011 at 7:47 AM, Alexander Graf <[email protected]> wrote:
>> 
>> On 15.03.2011, at 08:09, Stefan Hajnoczi wrote:
>> 
>>> On Mon, Mar 14, 2011 at 10:57 PM, Guido Winkelmann
>>> <[email protected]> wrote:
>>>> On Monday 14 March 2011 20:32:23 Stefan Hajnoczi wrote:
>>>>> On Mon, Mar 14, 2011 at 6:05 PM, Guido Winkelmann
>>>>> 
>>>>> <[email protected]> wrote:
>>>>>> Does anybody have an idea what might cause this or what might be done
>>>>>> about it?
>>>>> 
>>>>> The lsi_scsi emulation code is incomplete.  It does not handle some
>>>>> situations like the ORDERED commands or message 0x0c.
>>>>> 
>>>>> There is a patch to address the message 0xc issue, it has not been
>>>>> applied to qemu.git or qemu-kvm.git yet:
>>>>> http://patchwork.ozlabs.org/patch/63926/
>>>>> 
>>>>> Basically there is no one actively maintaining or reviewing patches
>>>>> for the lsi53c895a SCSI controller.
>>>> 
>>>> Does that mean that using the SCSI transport for virtual disks is 
>>>> officially
>>>> unsupported or deprecated or that it should be?
>>> 
>>> The LSI SCSI emulation in particular has not seen much attention.  As
>>> for the wider SCSI emulation there has been work over the past few
>>> months so it's alive and being used.
>>> 
>>>> Are things better with the IDE driver?
>>> 
>>> IDE is commonly used for compatibility with guests that do not have
>>> virtio-blk drivers.  It should work fine although performance is poor
>>> due to the IDE interface.
>>> 
>>>>> virtio-blk works very will with Linux guests.  Is there a reason you
>>>>> need to use SCSI emulation instead of virtio-blk?
>>>> 
>>>> I can probably use virtio-blk most of the time, I was just hoping to be 
>>>> able
>>>> to virtualize a wider array of operating systems, like the *BSDs,
>>>> (Open)Solaris, Windows, or even just some linux distributions whose 
>>>> installers
>>>> don't anticipate KVM and thus don't support virtio-<anything>.
>>> 
>>> Windows virtio-blk drivers are available and should be used:
>>> http://www.linux-kvm.org/page/WindowsGuestDrivers/Download_Drivers
>>> 
>>> BSD and Solaris don't ship with virtio-blk AFAIK.
>> 
>> This is pretty much the gap that AHCI is trying to fill. It's a 
>> well-supported HBA that pretty much every OS supports, but is still simple 
>> enough to implement. Unfortunately, 0.14 ships without BIOS support for it, 
>> so you can't boot off an AHCI disk yet. But as of 0.15, AHCI is pretty much 
>> the adapter of choice for your use case.
>> 
>> Please keep in mind that I didn't get FreeBSD rolling with AHCI emulation 
>> yet. OpenBSD works just fine.
> 
> I think one missing AHCI feature was legacy PATA mode?  Perhaps that
> is a good GSoC project if you're willing to mentor it, Alex.  I'm
> thinking that with complete AHCI and legacy mode it would be a good
> choice as the default non-virtio-blk disk interface.

AHCI can't runtime switch between AHCI mode and legacy mode, so I don't see the 
point in implementing the PATA mode counterparts?


Alex

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