From: drew@kinglear.cs.colorado.edu (Drew Eckhardt) Subject: Re: State of UltraStor 14F SCSI driver Date: Thu, 2 Jul 1992 01:38:51 GMT
In article <1992Jul1.175943.3281@natinst.com> scott@natinst.com (Scott A. Taylor) writes:
>I happen to be one of the few (2??) people running Linux with an UltraStor 14F
>SCSI controller; it seems like the rest of the Linux SCSI world is using
>Adaptec or Seagate controllers. I have seen mentioned in a few posts that
>someone is working on SCSI driver improvements, but I haven't seen any specific
>adapters mentioned (other than the trusty AHA1542). Is anybody working on
>the UltraStor driver? Are the improved drivers available anywhere? I looked in
>the obvious places on banjo.concert.net and tsx-11.mit.edu; no luck.
Dave Gentzel did the Ultrastor driver, and has finished an interrupt
driven version. I will include it in an interim release "RSN" - something
I've been promising for the last week, with real work and corrupt
floppy disks delaying the whole thing.
>I just received the 14F technical docs from UltraStor yesterday, so I am going
>to work on the existing driver this weekend, but I don't want to duplicate
>effort. Any hints for accomplishing such a task? I haven't fooled around
>with drivers before, but the UltraStor docs look pretty straightforward. I
>even joined the SCSI mailing list, but have yet to receive one piece of mail
>from it other than the acknowledgement that I was signed up.
>
>Thanks in advance!
>Scott
The SCSI mailing list :
I decided that it was easier to grab a channel on the linux-activists
list than to maintain the list locally.
Join the SCSI channel of linux-activists@joker.cs.hut.fi.
Driver improvements :
I didn't get the design for the current SCSI drivers right when I first
did them. Adding necessary features, like support for scatter / gather
in hardware or software, would be extremely difficult or kludgey at
best.
So, the SCSI drivers are in the middle of a major rewrite.
Since the new driver package will be incompatable with the old low level
drivers (Porting instructions will be provided), and since many performance
improvements, like scatter-gather
support, must wait for the new mid and highlevel code, you might
be better off waiting for them to get done before making drastic
changes.