From owner-aic7xxx Sat May 20 4:27: 4 2000 Delivered-To: aic7xxx@freebsd.org Received: from devserv.devel.redhat.com (devserv.devel.redhat.com [207.175.42.156]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 4D1B237B589 for ; Sat, 20 May 2000 04:27:01 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from dledford@redhat.com) Received: from redhat.com ([10.0.0.25]) by devserv.devel.redhat.com (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id HAA22446; Sat, 20 May 2000 07:26:46 -0400 Message-ID: <39267823.61C40E9E@redhat.com> Date: Sat, 20 May 2000 07:33:55 -0400 From: Doug Ledford Organization: Red Hat, Inc. X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.7 [en] (X11; U; Linux 2.2.14-1.1.0 i686) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Karl-Heinz Herrmann Cc: aic7xxx@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Adaptec 29160N References: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-aic7xxx@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Karl-Heinz Herrmann wrote: > > On 18-May-00 Doug Ledford wrote: > > It handles the low level protocol communications between the > > controller > > card and the devices and it also is responsible for the majority of > > the > > communications between the card and the kernel level driver. > > Now I'm curious: The code which handles all the communications (devices > and back to the OS/kernel) is downloaded *into* the card when it's > initialised? Or did I get something wrong here? That's right. > That seems like a quite central part of the card Firmware and I'm > astonished that this is changed regular basis by the OS.... Far easier to change it in software than in hardware. Besides, the Sequencer RAM on the card is volatile, so you have to download the code with every reboot as a minimum (the BIOS on the card does the same thing, only it downloads Adaptec's sequencer code, then we overwrite that with our own). -- Doug Ledford http://people.redhat.com/dledford Please check my web site for aic7xxx updates/answers before e-mailing me about problems To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe aic7xxx" in the body of the message