On Mon, Dec 17, 2007 at 03:27:03PM -0800, Garrett D'Amore wrote: > A bit of background here. > > 1) David's driver is really very, very clean. A nice bit of code.
Thank you, that means a lot to me. > 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. My boss has just installed the LSI driver on a machine here, so I had a quick look at what it presents to the operating system. Unfortunately the things I had hoped would be there aren't. There's no management tools, and I didn't see any FMA. I'm curious as to what advantage the LSI driver has over mine. I'd hoped that LSI would be able to do something much better on Solaris. > 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? I've had packages up at http://www.itee.uq.edu.au/~dlg/mfi/ for months. Last time we checked (which was months ago) there were over 300 downloads of the package. I've had no complaints or bug reports since I fixed partial DMA transfers in February. I know people are using this. A lot of people. > 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. I think you can fix that with the caching mode page against the scsi disk itself. Anyway, I am frustrated with how long OpenSolaris has had open code available to it to improve the system, and sat on their hands. dlg > > > -- 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 > >_______________________________________________ > >driver-discuss mailing list > >[email protected] > >http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/driver-discuss > > > > > _______________________________________________ driver-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/driver-discuss
