On 11 Jan 2001, Johan Kullstam wrote:
> Gérard Roudier <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
>
> > On Thu, 11 Jan 2001, Alan Cox wrote:
> >
> > > > > For 2.4 as their authors adopt them. Adopting the new eh code is a good
> > > > > idea
> > > > [Venkatesh Ramamurthy] Most of the prominent SCSI HBA players in
> > > > the industry have not used the new eh code!!. So is it stable enough?
> > >
> > > The symbios driver has, and it now handles things like hot disk removal which
> > > didnt work before. Gerhard is the obvious man to comment
> >
> > Btw, my first name is Gérard. :)
> >
> > Only SYM-2 uses the new SCSI EH code. Stock Linux SYM/NCR drivers
> > (1.6/1.7) use SCSI obsolete EH.
> >
> > For now, I received a very small number of reports about SYM-2 driver
> > under Linux. And since I haven't any idea about the number of people who
> > actually tried or use it, I still consider it Beta. I would be glad so few
> > reports to just mean that the driver is really reliable.
> > As a result, I also cannot state about the stability of the new SCSI EH
> > code.
>
> does this new driver version work with 2.4.0 kernels? i found at
> ftp.tux.org some information about sym-2 saying that it would work
> with 2.2.1[6-8] and that 2.0 was out.
2.0 is out for the reason it hasn't the new SCSI EH code and bloating the
glue code for Linux in order to support obsolete SCSI EH for 2.0 didn't
seem worthwhile to me.
About 2.4.0, I cannot claim that the driver is working with 2.4.0, for the
simple reason I didn't try it yet under 2.4.0. But it has been reported to
work under some recent kernel. The only tiny problem could be that I only
provide driver sources for latest Linux versions and, at least, some
simple changes in the linux/scsi/Makefile have to be applied manually for
the driver to build.
My personnal feeling about SYM-2.1.1 (sym-2.1.0 + patch-2.1.1) status is:
- Fully trustable under FreeBSD since the source code is mostly
repackaging that separates glue from core rather that rewrite.
- Use with care under Linux since the glue code for Linux has been heavily
reworked from parts of sym53c8xx source. Probably no serious bugs that
will eat filesystems, but no guarantee that the driver will work on
non-IA32 machines, for example.
Btw, I received a few reports about SYM-2 under Linux. Btw, it has been
reported to work with Alpha (at least on the machine it has been tried).
SYM-2 works fine for me under both Linux and FreeBSD. I have switched my
FreeBSD system to SYM-2 2 weeks ago and will switch my Linux-2.2.18 system
to SYM-2 over the week-end given that I didn't receive any report that
may let think that the driver is not trustable under Linux.
There are some changes in SYM-2, notably regarding U160 chips (but some
address other chips), that will not be backported. I encourage people who
use sym53c8xx chips to give a try with SYM-2 now if they want the driver
to be quite operating when they will really need SYM-2 features that
aren't in SYM-1 nor in NCR-3.
Gérard.
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