Date: Thu, 25 Nov 1999 19:48:51 +0100 (CET) From: Wilko Bulte <wilko@yedi.iaf.nl> To: winter@jurai.net (Matthew N. Dodd) Cc: scsi@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: NEWS: SYM53C1010 and Ultra3 support Message-ID: <199911251848.TAA00842@yedi.iaf.nl> In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.4.20.9911250041000.7305-100000@sasami.jurai.net> from "Matthew N. Dodd" at "Nov 25, 1999 0:42:32 am"
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As Matthew N. Dodd wrote ... > On Wed, 24 Nov 1999, Wilko Bulte wrote: > > Allow me to make a remark here: where does that leave people with older > > *mainboards with embedded NCR chips* ? Might be not too interesting > > for Intel folks, but most likely *is* for the Alpha folks. > > > > Mind you, I have not checked this on my Alphas (and the one Intel > > with embedded ncr) but I have a *bad* feeling over it as they are > > older stuff. > > > > The 'lets throw away the old hardware' that reigns the Intel world is > > less applicable to the Alpha world. A driver that cannot accomodate > > older hardware is a step in the wrong direction here. > > I think thats why the conversation was about turning off support in the > NCR driver for devices that the SYM supported; no support would be lost > but the most efficient driver would be used for some of the newer chips. Hmm. Playing the daemons advocate once again: IIRC one of the most pressing reasons for the new sym driver is that the ncr driver is not really actively maintained and only understood by the happy(?) few. If sym goes mainstream ncr will quickly grow stale I'm afraid. And stale stuff get's axed pretty quickly (there are ample precedents). Isn't there a way to have sym understand both old and new chips, with the new chips result in a full featured driver, whereas at the same time the older chip revs run in 'compatibility mode'. Or does this introduce too much bloat? Don't misunderstand: I think getting a better NCR driver is an excellent development! Wilko -- | / o / / _ Arnhem, The Netherlands - Powered by FreeBSD - |/|/ / / /( (_) Bulte WWW : http://www.tcja.nl http://www.freebsd.org To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-scsi" in the body of the message
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