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Date:      Wed, 7 Jul 1999 10:40:45 -0600 (MDT)
From:      "Justin T. Gibbs" <gibbs@narnia.plutotech.com>
To:        Karl-Heinz Herrmann <k.-h.herrmann@fz-juelich.de>
Cc:        aic7xxx@FreeBSD.org
Subject:   Re: multi scsi questions
Message-ID:  <199907071640.KAA00893@narnia.plutotech.com>
In-Reply-To: <XFMail.990707182935.k.-h.herrmann@fz-juelich.de>

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Confussion abounds...

> Sorry, I don't get the complete picture. 
> 
> 1) Do you want to put the two controllers on *one* SCSI-Bus?
> 2) Or do you wan't to use both cards, having two separate SCSI-Buses with
>    their respective own devices?
> 
> In Case 1) I don't think this is working just like that yet (And why do you
> want it anyway?)

Multi-initiator environments are becoming more and more common these
days.  This has been supported in FreeBSD (and just about any 
comercial UNIX) for some time now.  I would bet that Linux already
supports it or could be easily modified to do so.

> Only Widecontroller have ID's above 7, and only wide devices can use ID's
> above 7. You can't use a non-wide device on ID's like 11. 
> 
> And it seems[1], that non-wide devices "see" a call to a wide device with 
> ID 9 on the same SCSI-Bus as a call to ID 2 -- If there is a non-wide
> device with ID 2 it will/can get confused.

This is not the case.  SCSI uses the data bus lines as a bitmask of
device ids wishing to access the bus.  The narrow devices cannot
see the high byte, so cannot see that the devices with IDs above 7
are interrested in the bus.  What the narrow devices can see is
that the bus is 'busy' and that 'someone' has won arbitration.  To
get around this problem, parallel SCSI (without the fair arbitration
extension of SPI-3) uses a prioritized arbitration scheme based on
the ID of the requester.  The priority, from highest to lowest, is
as follows: 7->0, 15->8.  When a device with an ID lower than 8 arbitrates
along with a device with an ID greater than 7, the device with the high
ID knows that it has lost the arbitration and will get off the bus.  The
device with the low device ID doesn't need to see the high byte for
this to work.

--
Justin


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