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Date:      Tue, 3 Mar 1998 23:50:07 -0700 (MST)
From:      "Justin T. Gibbs" <gibbs@narnia.plutotech.com>
To:        Tom <tom@sdf.com>
Cc:        hackers@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: do you support
Message-ID:  <199803040650.XAA14156@narnia.plutotech.com>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.3.95q.980226230152.19894F-100000@misery.sdf.com>

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In article <Pine.BSF.3.95q.980226230152.19894F-100000@misery.sdf.com> you wrote:
> 
> On Thu, 26 Feb 1998, Mike Smith wrote:
> 
>> >   Then I'll consider you surprised then, because it is running CAM.
>> 
>> I am surprised. 8)  I wonder if the demon that did the backport would 
>> consider bundling it such that we could ship it as an optional extra?
> 
>   Well, this was discussed on freebsd-scsi I believe...
> 
>   Justin and/or Dave G are working on making a patchkit for 2.2-stable I
> believe.

I did the port of CAM back to 2.2 in December of last year after
David called me up to complain, yet again, of instability in our
current SCSI code.  The patches have "rotted" and won't work with
the most recent snapshot, but I plan to release patches for 2.2 in
the next CAM snapshot (real soon now... I promise! 8-).

> There is is even talking including CAM in the 2.2 branch after
> 2.2.6.  I suspect that would be done as a kernel option, because some
> drivers are not CAMified yet.

Not exactly.  I talked about bringing into stable a few of the
changes from current upon which CAM relies, to make it almost
trivial to drop CAM into either current or stable.  CAM may wind
up on a branch in the near future, but it will not be "standard"
in either current or stable until all current devices are supported.

To respond to a few other comments in this thread:

There are problems in the ahc driver in current that I've known
about for some time.  I'm sorry that certain users are plagued by
these bugs, but I can't do anything more about them than I am
already.  Several of these bugs are simply unfixable in the SCSI
framework in current.  Instead of attempting patch after patch to
attempt to hack around these issues, I decided to write the CAM
code instead.  I know it doesn't help that the last snapshot we
released doesn't apply cleanly to a current, current, but I am
working hard on rectifying this.

So why is it that the NCR driver works so well?  I think this is
more a matter of perspective than fact.  There are users of both
the Adaptec and NCR cards that will say they work flawlessly and
users who say they break in configuration X.  It's my hope that
as CAM is a much cleaner framework, we will be able to resolve these
issues swiftly as CAM receives more testing.

As for CAM being for the "true hacker" only, I don't think this needs
to be the case.  I'm focusing now on getting the next snapshot out
so that proper installation media can be generated and once this is
done, I don't anticipate users that can live with the limited device
support in CAM having any reliability issues.  The feature set of CAM
grows daily and I hope that more and more people try using it.

--
Justin

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