Good eye Bruce,
AFAIK, the system that wasn't built to run Linux, it was just that there
was some free time and an internal guy took the opportunity to see
how a Linux 2.4 kernel would do on the machine. Turns out pretty well
:-) I don't believe that he had to patch the kernel at all to achieve
this, the current Alpha updates were sufficient.
So...those PCI lines about the Emulex Fibre Channel HBA's are just the
kernel recognizing that something is there. There isn't currently an
Alpha Emulex driver that exists for Linux.
A little history and a rant:
A couplle months ago Emulex announced that it was going to release
it's Fibre Channel drivers Open Source for Linux and that it would
compile for Alpha Linux machines as well:
http://www.emulex.com/press/2000/linux.html
Well, a few days ago I was informed that they had released the driver.
So I went to their ftp site:
ftp://ftp.emulex.com/pub/fibrechannel/drivers/all_other_lp_models/linux/4.02f/
Downloaded the driver and had a look. Hmmm... the driver is NOT
Open Source and does NOT compile on Alpha Linux. I've contacted Emulex
about this but the director of marketing that I talked to is holding the
position that the press release was in error about the Open Source release.
I don't believe him, and I've told him as much because the directory
that the partial source is contained in is named "OpenSource"
capitalization and all. And the documentation mentions that it is Open
Source.
If you look at what they provide in the download, you will see that
the key part of the driver (the actual interface with the Emulex
hardware) is closed x86 object files (one for uniprocessor and one for
multiprocessor). The source is really just the upper layers of the
Fibre Channel stack which isn't very valuable because the protocol is
very well documented and Qlogic and Interphase provide full linux
source for their FC cards.
If you want to contact Emulex more about this, the guy I've been
talking to is their director of marketing Mike Kane:
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Joel Martin
On Mon, Sep 18, 2000 at 11:05:23AM -0400, Bruce McCulley wrote:
> So it's got a fair amount of grunt on the compute side, how's the I/O
> bandwidth?
>
> I only saw 8 fiberchannels, right? Am I missing anything?
>
> :-)
>
> Joel Martin wrote:
>
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