ataNG

[David Leimbach]

On Oct 24, 2003, at 1:46 PM, Kip Macy wrote:

    I am not opposed to it, *BUT* I have one requirement... that it be
    brought in under a new device name and that we keep the existing 
ata
    driver.

    The reason is that while ATAng has new features, especially SATA 
support,
    that our older driver does not, it also has a lot of problems 
(that have
    been brought up on the freebsd-current lists), and it is also 
still
    under some pretty serious development in -current and breakages 
are
    likely to continue in the forseeable future.

    So if you want to bring ATAng in give it a new name and a new 
major
    device number.  We can add support for the device number in the 
boot
    code so machines can boot into the new driver, and perhaps 
differentiate
    the PCI ID's it recognizes to allow both drivers to be resident at
    once (or, alternatively, only allow one or the other driver to be
    linked into the kernel).

					-Matt
					Matthew Dillon
					<dillon at xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Your approach is quite prudent. I'm not one to advocate destabilizing
existing systems. Most of the breakage I've seen has been in atapicam
which wasn't entirely Soren's fault. This is an integral part of the
system so, before one even advocated its use, it would have to have
quite a bit of testing on a wide variety of hardware. I am almost all
SCSI in-house. The only person I know of at the moment with the 
resources
to do the testing is Dave Rhodus, so it would largely be contingent on
his interest.

I've been running it for a little while... If you watch the 
FBSD-current CVS logs
he seems to have been recently tweaking timeout values and such for some
odd hardware he is coming across.

Its a big effort for him no doubt... I don't want to give him more 
grief.  Perhaps
it should wait a while until Søren stabilizes it more?

I can access my SATA disk from FBSD but currently I have linux on it.

Dave
				-Kip