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Date:      Wed, 11 Aug 1999 22:33:15 -0400
From:      Keith Mitchell <kmitch@weenix.guru.org>
To:        "Kenneth D. Merry" <ken@kdm.org>
Subject:   Re: CAM (driver devel) question
Message-ID:  <19990811223315.A93634@weenix.guru.org>
In-Reply-To: <199908120100.TAA51068@panzer.kdm.org>; from Kenneth D. Merry on Wed, Aug 11, 1999 at 07:00:44PM -0600
References:  <19990811201425.A89846@weenix.guru.org> <199908120100.TAA51068@panzer.kdm.org>

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On Wed, Aug 11, 1999 at 07:00:44PM -0600, Kenneth D. Merry wrote:
> Not all of the drivers support S/G.  And you're right, it isn't used in any
> of the upper level code at the moment.

All of the drivers I looked at (aic7xxx, dpt, buslogic) all supported 
scatter/gather.  But it looked like they only supported scatter/gather if
they were passed a scatter/gather buffer from the upper layer (and since it
doesn't look like the upper layer sends down a scatter gather list then
I am guessing that scatter/gather never occurs).

It looks like from the drivers they take whatever buffer they get passed
from the upper layer and pass it down to the card (if its a physical address
or maps it into DMAable memory via bus_dmamap_load() if its a virtual
address).  So my initial conclusion was the drivers were architected so
that when the upper layer supported S/G they would too without modification.
but I wanted to be sure before I coded everything.

> You can probably get away with not supporting it, but it would probably be
> a good idea to do so if you can.

Yeah its a very good thing to have (especially for large transfers).

> Just out of curiosity, what card are you writing a driver for?  It would be
> nice to know, to make sure you aren't duplicating any effort...

I'm working on a driver for the IBM ServeRAID card but unfortunately I don't
have the necessary approval to distribute any of it when I'm done.  I
need to convince management that its worthwhile to support FreeBSD --
right now most of them have never heard of it let alone feel the need
to support it.  Thats something I plan on trying to fix but its
uncertain if I'll succeed (especially if very few people request it).

If lots of people buying the ServeRAID card / Netfinity servers were to
call IBM and request BSD that might help...  That seemed to work for
Linux ;->

-- 
Keith Mitchell
Email: kmitch@guru.org				PGP key available upon request


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