Date: Thu, 25 Nov 1999 22:52:52 +0100 (MET) From: Gerard Roudier <groudier@club-internet.fr> To: Wilko Bulte <wilko@yedi.iaf.nl> Cc: "Matthew N. Dodd" <winter@jurai.net>, scsi@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: NEWS: SYM53C1010 and Ultra3 support Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.3.95.991125223709.570A-100000@localhost> In-Reply-To: <199911251848.TAA00842@yedi.iaf.nl>
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On Thu, 25 Nov 1999, Wilko Bulte wrote: > 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 old= er > > > *mainboards with embedded NCR chips* ? Might be not too interesting= =20 > > > for Intel folks, but most likely *is* for the Alpha folks. > > >=20 > > > 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. > > >=20 > > > 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.=20 > >=20 > > 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= =2E >=20 > 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). >=20 > 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?=20 There is no way from me for either developing or maintaining the driver you seem to want to have and I will _never_ use such a driver since I know of either the complexity=3Dless reliability or the lacking of feature support such a driver would suffer of. If such a driver ever comes from another source, this will not be a problem for me at all, as you can guess. > Don't misunderstand: I think getting a better NCR driver is an excellent > development! I do misunderstood all of your postings, and btw, if the ncr driver would have appeared to me way broken or too much under-featured I would have proposed fixes for that. This did happen for the CTEST0 fix, and some years ago I did propose the ULTRA/ULTRA2 support for the ncr.=20 NCR has sold its micro-electronic department since about 7 years IIRC.=20 Advertising NCR when talking about the SYM53C8XX family does not make sense since years. SYMBIOS ingenieers have done a _great_ job in the enhancement of the 53C8XX family and AFAIK the SYMBIOS brand name still exists (you may have a look at LSILOGIC site).=20 FYI, I have plans for some minimal cleanups, fixes, and enhancements of the ncr driver. This work is only deferred after SYM-0.1.0.=20 G=E9rard. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-scsi" in the body of the message
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