On Tue, 9 Aug 2005, Shachar Shemesh wrote: > Can anyone recommend to me a Fiber channel storage device (HBA) that has > open source drivers in Linux? I am being offered something called > "FC2-133" (a.k.a 24p0960). Some initial research shows that the Linux > drivers for this adapter arebinary only, which means I'm looking into a > series of kernel compilations, much prayer, and things not working. It > also means I'm locked to one or two specific distros. I would rather not > be in this mess. > > I'm wondering what are other people doing in that respect? What hardware > do you use? I saw that a company called "Emulex" is producing open > source drivers for kernel 2.6 series for their HBAs. These do not appear > to be part of the actual vanilla kernel, but are shipped with Suse. I'm > wondering whether anyone has any experience with that?
the common FC HBA controllers with linux systems seem to come from either Qlogic or Emulex. both _now_ have open-source drivers. Qlogic drivers come as part of the kernel since a long time ago. with 2.4 kernels they had buggy drivers, and you needed to download working drivers from qlogic's web site, but with the 2.6 kernel things look good. Emulex drivers were added to the kernel in version 2.6.12-2. before that, you had them in distributions, or you could download and compile them from their lpfcxxxx sourceforge project page (http://sourceforge.net/projects/lpfcxxxx/). we encountered various issues with emulex drivers that came with SLES9, while the Qlogic drivers that come with it (as well as with RHEL4) seem to function properly. we also tried qlogic with gentoo and it works properly with gentoo's kernel (2.6.11-something). note that we're developing kernel drivers that interact with the SCSI sub-system in a manner that normal applications do not necessarily use - so they might have no problem with the older emulex drivers. hope this helps, -- guy "For world domination - press 1, or dial 0, and please hold, for the creator." -- nob o. dy ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
