On Oct 17, 2006, at 1:59 PM, Richard Elling - PAE wrote:
The realities of the hardware world strike again.
Sun does use the Siig SATA chips in some products, Marvell in others,
and NVidia MCPs in others. The difference is in who writes the
drivers.
NVidia, for example, has a history of developing their own drivers and
keeping them closed-source. This is their decision and, I speculate,
largely based on their desire to keep the hardware implementation
details
from their competitors.
If you want to learn the source of mine, Frank's and undoubtedly
others' ire, please refer to:
http://www.sun.com/products-n-solutions/hardware/docs/html/
819-3722-15/index.html#21924
This is the release notes of the X2100. The indication that hot-swap
works under Windows (but not Linux or Solaris) seems to be an obvious
indicator of it not being a hardware lacking, but a driver one (which
would make sense, ata does not expect a device to go away).
Further, if my memory isn't playing tricks on me, when I received my
first X2100 (around a month or two after they were first released) I
recall an addition small yellow paper tucked in the accessories box
separately from the standard documentation saying that hot-swap under
Solaris would be supported in a future Solaris version.
There's also a bug open on this matter, and has been open for a long
time. If this wasn't feasible, I imagine the bug would be closed
already with a WONTFIX.
If you want NVidia drivers for Solaris, then please let NVidia know.
As an outsider, I don't want to trivialize the happenings in the Sun-
nVidia relationship, but look at nge(7d) as an example. Surely if
that exists (closed source, and I assume it's provided by nVidia in
part or whole and under NDA) then a NV SATA driver shouldn't be hard
to obtain, even if it too ended up being closed-source (a la the
Marvell driver).
/dale
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