> Is AHCI the common API for communicating to the SATA H/W by most O/S's? Is > this what Linux uses or is there another API that provides cross platform > support?
According to Wikipedia AHCI is a hardware independent way of accessing SATA devices. I know that early SATA interfaces didn't support the AHCI interface, but I think many recent ones do (certainly all the Intel chipsets seem to.) If you want to support many chipsets with one driver, AHCI would appear to be the way to go. I have AHCI support compiled into my Linux kernel running on a PE2950, but it doesn't appear to be in use. I can't remember whether this is because I have a chipset-specific driver doing the job instead, or whether I just have no disks plugged into the onboard controller. I guess the only way you could know for sure would be to compile a Linux kernel with *only* the AHCI driver and boot that, and see if it can detect any of your disks in the boot messages. > The AHCI emulation mode sounds nice since it would allow our > existing IDE driver to support SATA here with little work. I believe AHCI itself does not provide legacy emulation, this is a chipset specific feature. I think most Intel chipsets let you access the SATA drives as though they were standard IDE devices connected to a PIIX4 controller, but some other chipsets I have used do not provide this feature. I take it running your OS inside a VM is not an option? And it's high performance enough that (even though it's circa-1980) using BIOS calls to access the disk is also out of the question? I guess asking your customers to set the BIOS to legacy mode would at least give you time to figure out a solution. Cheers, Adam. _______________________________________________ Linux-PowerEdge mailing list [email protected] https://lists.us.dell.com/mailman/listinfo/linux-poweredge Please read the FAQ at http://lists.us.dell.com/faq
