Re: Promise IDE board docs
It seems Mike Tancsa wrote: On 24 Feb 1999 18:39:36 -0500, in sentex.lists.freebsd.current you wrote: Hmm, which suggests that I need to leave the do it by hand code in there and recommend removing the BIOS :( Are there any plans to support the Promise Fast Trak IDE RAID controller ? Well, sortof, the FastTrak is AFAIK the exact same HW as the Ultra33, just with a more advanced BIOS that does the RAID stuff. The current planned support is to use it just as a Ultra33 controller, and then use ccd to do the RAID magic under FreeBSD. -Søren To Unsubscribe: send mail to majord...@freebsd.org with unsubscribe freebsd-current in the body of the message
Re: Promise IDE board docs
At 04:49 AM 2/25/99 , Søren Schmidt wrote: It seems Mike Tancsa wrote: On 24 Feb 1999 18:39:36 -0500, in sentex.lists.freebsd.current you wrote: Hmm, which suggests that I need to leave the do it by hand code in there and recommend removing the BIOS :( Are there any plans to support the Promise Fast Trak IDE RAID controller ? Well, sortof, the FastTrak is AFAIK the exact same HW as the Ultra33, just with a more advanced BIOS that does the RAID stuff. The current planned support is to use it just as a Ultra33 controller, and then use ccd to do the RAID magic under FreeBSD. Interesting. So the BIOS doesnt actually do the RAID work ? It still needs to be done in software ? ---Mike ** Mike Tancsa, Network Admin* m...@sentex.net Sentex Communications Corp, * http://www.sentex.net/mike Cambridge, Ontario* 01.519.651.3400 Canada* To Unsubscribe: send mail to majord...@freebsd.org with unsubscribe freebsd-current in the body of the message
Re: Promise IDE board docs
Well, sortof, the FastTrak is AFAIK the exact same HW as the Ultra33, just
with a more advanced BIOS that does the RAID stuff. The current planned
support is to use it just as a Ultra33 controller, and then use ccd to
do the RAID magic under FreeBSD.
Interesting. So the BIOS doesnt actually do the RAID work ? It still needs
to be done in software ?
I think what he means is that if the OS supports it, the RAID stuff is
done in the BIOS. We don't yet support it, so it has to be done with software.
as an aside, I'd suggest vinum over ccd for the software part.
I have two 4 gig drives, and the performance is on par with what
I've seen from single 8 and even 12 gig drives.
Cheers,
--
obfuscate v.t. darken; obscure; bewilder.
int i;main(){for(;i[]i;++i){--i;}];read('-'-'-',i+++hell\
o, world!\n,'/'/'/'));}read(j,i,p){write(j/p+p,i---j,i/i);}
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Re: Promise IDE board docs
In 199902230725.caa02...@y.dyson.net, John S. Dyson wrote: Søren Schmidt said: It should work, but the promise support in the old system is, well, hacky at best. I'm not sure if Promise supports more than one card at a time, but from looking at the chip specs, it should work just fine, and if the hardware works, at least the new driver will support it. I run with two (2) boards, but it appears that certain (all?) versions of the bios require that you remove the chip from all but one board. I did run such a setup as well, but the disks on the first controller with BIOS ran much faster than those on the BIOSless controller. Martin -- % Martin Cracauer craca...@cons.org http://www.cons.org/cracauer/ BSD User Group Hamburg, Germany http://www.bsdhh.org/ To Unsubscribe: send mail to majord...@freebsd.org with unsubscribe freebsd-current in the body of the message
Re: Promise IDE board docs
It seems Martin Cracauer wrote: In 199902230725.caa02...@y.dyson.net, John S. Dyson wrote: Søren Schmidt said: It should work, but the promise support in the old system is, well, hacky at best. I'm not sure if Promise supports more than one card at a time, but from looking at the chip specs, it should work just fine, and if the hardware works, at least the new driver will support it. I run with two (2) boards, but it appears that certain (all?) versions of the bios require that you remove the chip from all but one board. I did run such a setup as well, but the disks on the first controller with BIOS ran much faster than those on the BIOSless controller. Hmm, which suggests that I need to leave the do it by hand code in there and recommend removing the BIOS :( -Søren To Unsubscribe: send mail to majord...@freebsd.org with unsubscribe freebsd-current in the body of the message
Re: Promise IDE board docs
On 24 Feb 1999 18:39:36 -0500, in sentex.lists.freebsd.current you wrote: Hmm, which suggests that I need to leave the do it by hand code in there and recommend removing the BIOS :( Are there any plans to support the Promise Fast Trak IDE RAID controller ? ---Mike Mike Tancsa (mdtan...@sentex.net) Sentex Communications Corp, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada To Unsubscribe: send mail to majord...@freebsd.org with unsubscribe freebsd-current in the body of the message
Re: Promise IDE board docs
Martin Cracauer said: In 199902230725.caa02...@y.dyson.net, John S. Dyson wrote: Søren Schmidt said: It should work, but the promise support in the old system is, well, hacky at best. I'm not sure if Promise supports more than one card at a time, but from looking at the chip specs, it should work just fine, and if the hardware works, at least the new driver will support it. I run with two (2) boards, but it appears that certain (all?) versions of the bios require that you remove the chip from all but one board. I did run such a setup as well, but the disks on the first controller with BIOS ran much faster than those on the BIOSless controller. The order of the boards is critical, and which bios is installed. Of course, YMMV. Each drive on each controller in my case runs at full speed :-). On the bootup sequence, I get one BIOS display of eight drive slots, as if I am using one board, with 8 drive positions (even though I really have two boards.) Of course, the PCI bus probes the controllers as two controllers, but the BIOS kind of acts like one logical controller. -- John | Never try to teach a pig to sing, dy...@iquest.net | it makes one look stupid jdy...@nc.com | and it irritates the pig. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majord...@freebsd.org with unsubscribe freebsd-current in the body of the message
Re: Promise IDE board docs
It seems John S. Dyson wrote: Søren Schmidt said: It should work, but the promise support in the old system is, well, hacky at best. I'm not sure if Promise supports more than one card at a time, but from looking at the chip specs, it should work just fine, and if the hardware works, at least the new driver will support it. I run with two (2) boards, but it appears that certain (all?) versions of the bios require that you remove the chip from all but one board. Bingo, looking at the HW specs I was pretty sure it would, but not being able to try it, I wouldn't bet on it. The BIOS on those boards are a different story, I run mine without the BIOS too, but then one has to setup the tranferrates etc by hand. -Søren To Unsubscribe: send mail to majord...@freebsd.org with unsubscribe freebsd-current in the body of the message
Re: Promise IDE board docs
Søren Schmidt said: It seems John S. Dyson wrote: Søren Schmidt said: It should work, but the promise support in the old system is, well, hacky at best. I'm not sure if Promise supports more than one card at a time, but from looking at the chip specs, it should work just fine, and if the hardware works, at least the new driver will support it. I run with two (2) boards, but it appears that certain (all?) versions of the bios require that you remove the chip from all but one board. Bingo, looking at the HW specs I was pretty sure it would, but not being able to try it, I wouldn't bet on it. The BIOS on those boards are a different story, I run mine without the BIOS too, but then one has to setup the tranferrates etc by hand. Now, that is INTERESTING. With the bios that I have, all of the ports on both boards get configured properly, and run UDMA. Next time I crack my box open, I'll let you know the bios version and board (and bios) positions. -- John | Never try to teach a pig to sing, dy...@iquest.net | it makes one look stupid jdy...@nc.com | and it irritates the pig. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majord...@freebsd.org with unsubscribe freebsd-current in the body of the message
Re: Promise IDE board docs
It seems Manuel Bouyer wrote: Hi, I initially intended to ask this to John Dyson, but I don't know how to reach him. Maybe someone else on this list can anserw :) I'm looking for documentations about the promise PCI IDE controller, to add support for this in NetBSD. Does someone know how John got the informations for the FreeBSD support ? I sent a mail to the support address listed on their www page, but got nothing back yet ... You can the docs from their web/ftp site, I did (long ago), bear in mind that they are pretty limitted, and only provides rudimentary information on the chips. If you have questions, I might be able to answer, having just written the support for our new ata/atapi system -Søren To Unsubscribe: send mail to majord...@freebsd.org with unsubscribe freebsd-current in the body of the message
Re: Promise IDE board docs
Søren Schmidt writes: If you have questions, I might be able to answer, having just written the support for our new ata/atapi system Is this new ata/atapi system the rumored rewrite of the existing IDE (i386/isa/wd.c, /pci/ide_pci.c) driver? How close are you to completion? I have a slightly off-track question -- should I be able to throw 3 of these boards in a modern (440bx based) motherboard, and run 6 ATA disks (1 per controller, 2 controllers per card) expect things to 'just work' or should I expect problems? LINT doesn't list example configs beyond 1 Promise in addition to the on-board controllers, so I'm wondering if anybody's ever tested a config like this...? Thanks, Drew -- Andrew Gallatin, Sr Systems Programmer http://www.cs.duke.edu/~gallatin Duke University Email: galla...@cs.duke.edu Department of Computer Science Phone: (919) 660-6590 To Unsubscribe: send mail to majord...@freebsd.org with unsubscribe freebsd-current in the body of the message
Re: Promise IDE board docs
It seems Andrew Gallatin wrote: Søren Schmidt writes: If you have questions, I might be able to answer, having just written the support for our new ata/atapi system Is this new ata/atapi system the rumored rewrite of the existing IDE (i386/isa/wd.c, /pci/ide_pci.c) driver? How close are you to completion? Yes. I have ATA disks running, and I'm close to having the ATAPI part done also. So far things are looking very good, performance is up one notch on all the ATA HW I have in my lab. I have no projected date for this yet, but progress is speeding up.. I have a slightly off-track question -- should I be able to throw 3 of these boards in a modern (440bx based) motherboard, and run 6 ATA disks (1 per controller, 2 controllers per card) expect things to 'just work' or should I expect problems? LINT doesn't list example configs beyond 1 Promise in addition to the on-board controllers, so I'm wondering if anybody's ever tested a config like this...? It should work, but the promise support in the old system is, well, hacky at best. I'm not sure if Promise supports more than one card at a time, but from looking at the chip specs, it should work just fine, and if the hardware works, at least the new driver will support it. -Søren To Unsubscribe: send mail to majord...@freebsd.org with unsubscribe freebsd-current in the body of the message
Re: Promise IDE board docs
Søren Schmidt writes: Is this new ata/atapi system the rumored rewrite of the existing IDE (i386/isa/wd.c, /pci/ide_pci.c) driver? How close are you to completion? Yes. I have ATA disks running, and I'm close to having the ATAPI part done also. So far things are looking very good, performance is up one notch on all the ATA HW I have in my lab. I have no projected date for this yet, but progress is speeding up.. That's really good news. I'm looking forward to using the IDE interfaces in my alphas ;-) Drew -- Andrew Gallatin, Sr Systems Programmer http://www.cs.duke.edu/~gallatin Duke University Email: galla...@cs.duke.edu Department of Computer Science Phone: (919) 660-6590 To Unsubscribe: send mail to majord...@freebsd.org with unsubscribe freebsd-current in the body of the message
Re: Promise IDE board docs
Søren Schmidt said: It should work, but the promise support in the old system is, well, hacky at best. I'm not sure if Promise supports more than one card at a time, but from looking at the chip specs, it should work just fine, and if the hardware works, at least the new driver will support it. I run with two (2) boards, but it appears that certain (all?) versions of the bios require that you remove the chip from all but one board. -- John | Never try to teach a pig to sing, dy...@iquest.net | it makes one look stupid jdy...@nc.com | and it irritates the pig. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majord...@freebsd.org with unsubscribe freebsd-current in the body of the message
