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Date:      Sat, 29 Dec 2001 15:24:55 +0100
From:      Alson van der Meulen <alm@flutnet.org>
To:        freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG
Cc:        sos@freebsd.dk
Subject:   Re: Possible Promise FastTrack RAID driver
Message-ID:  <20011229152455.J11901@alm.xs4all.nl>
In-Reply-To: <200112290915.fBT9F3H94505@freebsd.dk>
References:  <200112290906.fBT96wD92921@freebsd.dk> <200112290915.fBT9F3H94505@freebsd.dk>

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S?ren Schmidt(sos@freebsd.dk)@2001.12.29 10:15:03 +0000:
> It seems S?ren Schmidt wrote:
> > We already have support for the Fasttraks in the kernel (and have had that
> > for a long time now), with code that is developed outside Promise. 
> > However it still needs a bit of work, but with a little luck that should 
> > clear up soon..
> 
> BTW, it is interesting to see that they just used the ATA driver I've
> written for FreeBSD, ripped off the Copyright headers, and added ft_ to 
> all function names, then added their own RAID engine which seems to
> be a quick and dirty port of the win version....
sigh...

What this driver does have, and we don't, is support for RAID. AFAIK,
our own driver can only use it as an ATA controller. There's no
integration with vinum/ccd yet. At least, all previous posts I've found
seem to indicate this. Are there any plans to make vinum/ccd work with
these 'win-raid' controllers? Our driver seems to be able to read the
RAID configuration, but I don't see any connection to a raid engine.

They also seem to provide a CAM interface, and some utilities to view
the status and rescan the array, not to force a rebuild though.

It appears that a rip-off of our own driver, and a lame RAID engine is
of little use to us. But they can use the RAID function now, and we
don't (at least not together with the BIOS). It's of course possible to
use a separate disk for booting, and to use vinum to mirror/stripe the
both disks on the 'RAID' controller. That's what I plan to do, since I
want to have that server in production in 1.5 month, and I don't think
there will be any support for booting from vinum by then.

I don't have any experience in ATA/RAID coding, so I'm afraid I can be
of little help.

Alson

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