A bit of background here.
1) David's driver is really very, very clean. A nice bit of code.
2) LSI has a Solaris driver for this bit of hardware. It is closed
source, and it includes functionality that no one else can easily
reproduce because LSI does not give out programming specs.
3) LSI and Sun are in negotiations of trying to bring the LSI code to
OpenSolaris (most likely via usr/closed). I believe that this may be
stalled/stymied due to lawyers. (When is involvement of lawyers *ever*
a good thing?)
So, personally I'm torn on this issue. On one hand, I hate the idea
that LSI/Sun feet dragging can stall the project.... David has a
solution that works today. On the other hand, the "better"
(technically) solution is likely to appear at some point in the
not-distant future, and the pain and suffering associated with resolving
differences in the device path, etc. seems like it would be something
I'd like to avoid if at all possible.
Right now anyone can download David's code and install it. (David, do
you have pkgadd'able packages set up for this? Maybe we can post those
on a project page somewhere?) I like the idea of getting this stuff out
there to enable folks to play with it now... sort of like frkit or Masa
Murayama's drivers... useful but not yet ready for core ON?
If anyone from LSI is watching this, please pipe up. The lack of
progress on this particular front is particularly frustrating. I can't
imagine what kind of proprietary information LSI would want to protect
by suppressing programming information, but then again, I've not seen
the specs....
Btw, this particular problem (lack of LSI technical data) is frustrating
to other OS' besides Solaris. For example, on NetBSD mpt for SAS
adapters is consigned to rotten write performance due to lack of
technical data about the write cache.
-- Garrett
David Gwynne wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I have written a driver called mfi that supports the LSI MegaRAID SAS
> and Dell PERC 5 RAID controllers. This hardware currently lacks
> support in OpenSolaris, but a lot of of the big vendors (it seems
> like everyone except Sun) are now shipping these boards in their
> machines. Integrating this driver could open doors for OpenSolaris
> based distributions on these machines.
>
> I currently have a RFE 6556091 open against this code, however, I'd
> like to see the process of integration done in the open and by the
> community, hence this project proposal.
>
> The code for the driver is available at the following urls:
>
> http://www.itee.uq.edu.au/~dlg/mfi/
> https://svn.itee.uq.edu.au/repo/mfi/ (svn)
> https://svn.itee.uq.edu.au/viewvc/mfi/
>
> Feel free to contact me if you need further information.
>
> dlg
> _______________________________________________
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> http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/driver-discuss
>
>
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