From owner-freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG  Mon Aug 18 08:53:36 2003
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From: Soeren Schmidt <sos@spider.deepcore.dk>
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To: Dmitry Morozovsky <marck@rinet.ru>
Date: Mon, 18 Aug 2003 17:53:25 +0200 (CEST)
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cc: sos@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject: Re: Promise TX4000 MFC request
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It seems Dmitry Morozovsky wrote:
> Dear Soeren,
> 
> a couple of months ago, namely
> 
> > revision 1.8
> > date: 2003/05/01 06:20:50;  author: sos;  state: Exp;  lines: +17 -2
> > I'm pleased to announce that Promise is now supporting the FreeBSD
> > project by providing documentation (under NDA) and hardware for
> > testing. This commit is the first result of the cooperation, and
> > adds support for several of their new controllers that we didn't
> > support before (and probably newer would have without this arrangement).
> >
> > Add support for the Promise SATA150 TX2/TX4 and the Promise TX4000
> > controllers. This also adds support for various motherboard fitted
> > Promise SATA/ATA chips.
> > Note that this code uses memory mapped registers to minimize overhead.
> > I belive FreeBSD has made another first in the Open Source world
> > by being able to release support for this :)
> 
> Will these changes (in particular for TX4000, as we just got such a card) be
> MFCed in near future? I would be glad to test new driver ;-)

I have no immediate plans to backport the ATA driver..

The reasons are several:

The support for the newer Promise chips needs several not so trival
changes to the ATA driver (in fact the -current driver would need to
be backported for this to make sense).

The releng team might not be pleased with this, since a totally new
backport of a -current driver is not exactly was -stable is about.
(mind you the ATA driver is a pretty important peice of FreeBSD).

I dont have the spare time that this would take, maybe just maybe
some of our sponsors will pay me working hours to do it, but the
above issue with the "spirit" of -stable is still there.. 

-Søren