begin quoting Michael O'Keefe as of Mon, Dec 17, 2007 at 10:32:12AM -0800: > SJS wrote: > >begin quoting Neil Schneider as of Sun, Dec 16, 2007 at 06:07:57AM -0800: > >>SJS wrote: > >> > >>>That's exactly what I mean. Requiring a driver renders the "otherwise" > >>>clause meaningless at best, disingenuous at worst. > > > >>You have to have a kernel driver for ide, scsi, sata, sas, so why would > >>RAID be any different? > > > >I don't have a kernel driver for seagate, maxtor, or western digital. > >Why not? > > Um yes you do, it's the IDE or SCSI or SATA driver for your root device > which is typically compiled into the kernel so it can boot off that device.
You missed the point. Seagate makes drives. Maxtor makes drives. If I pull a Seagate drive, I can drop in a Maxtor. No driver change. > Every now and then, a new drive comes out that needs some tweaking of > the driver so the disk can be used by Linux, but mostly, the > IDE/SCSI/SATA sxtandard of communication is adhered to by the devices, > and you don't need a new driver to plug in that new drive. Yup! Exactly! > I don't know if there's a "standard" for RAID communications. > It would be nice if the RAID cards spoke IDE/SCSI/SATA so they actually > did look like disk block devices and didn't need any specific kernel > driver. Yup! That's my point. > I'm sure there are reasons why this doesn't happen, I don't know > what they are though. It's slightly harder. It avoids vendor lock-in. It helps provide vendor differentation. And it would only be appreciated by users of non-mainstream operating systems, which is a much smaller market. Plus, it's easier to ship something today that's slightly buggy but which can be upgraded tomorrow or when the customer complains. Get their money now and deliver a non-lemon product later. -- One day, I'll need custom drivers for my monitor, no doubt. Stewart Stremler -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
