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To: [email protected]
Subject:
Date: Thu, 02 Nov 2000 11:03:37 -0700
From: "Justin T. Gibbs" <gibbs@aslan>
Adaptec SCSI HBA device driver for the Linux Operating System
Justin T. Gibbs
Adaptec Inc.
[email protected]
2000/11/02
Introduction:
In an effort to increase its level of support for the Linux community,
Adaptec Inc. has committed to enhancing and maintaining the community
developed driver for Adaptec AIC78XX SCSI host bus adapters. This
package represents the first public Alpha release of the Adaptec
sponsored driver. As this is an Alpha release:
THIS DRIVER SHOULD NOT BE DEPLOYED EXCEPT IN A TESTING
ENVIRONMENT WHERE SYSTEM CORRUPTION, DATA LOSS, AND SYSTEM
INSTABILITY CAN BE TOLERATED.
This driver is under active development. New versions may
be found at:
http://people.FreeBSD.org/~gibbs/linux/
Supported Hardware:
All Adaptec Fast, Ultra, Ultra2 and Ultra160/m PCI adapters
are supported by this release. This includes, but it not
limited to the 2930, 2940, 2940UW, 2950U2W, 3950U2W, 19160,
29160, 39160, and motherboard versions of the
aic7850/55/59/60/70/80/90/91/92/67/97/99.
New Features:
o Adaptive tagged queuing algorithm. This new algorithm
will fine tune the queue depth for a particular device.
For devices with a fixed depth, the driver will eventually
determine that depth and from that point forward, avoid
queuing more commands than the device can handle. For
devices that report queue full for temporary resource
shortages, the driver will throttle back and slowly
attempt to increase the queue depth over time. Tagged
queuing is enabled by default.
o U160 is now supported on all U160 devices. The Adaptec
driver firmware issue that rendered U160 speeds unreliable
on some Quantum drives has been resolved.
ERRATA:
o Not all KERNEL_VERSION defines are completely correct.
Some assistance from the community in refining these
values would be appreciated. The current values
were determined based on porting efforts to 2.2.14,
2.3.99-pre9, and 2.4.0-test10, but an exhaustive search
of exactly when certain kernel interfaces changed was not
performed.
o The VL/EISA attachment has not been tested.
o The driver has not been audited for big endian issues,
and is not guaranteed to work on big endian systems.
The driver is 64bit clean.
o Domain Validation is not yet implemented.
o Several of the historical driver load options (for modules
or via LILO) are not yet honored.
o /proc support is not yet implemented.
Patching your kernel:
cd /usr/src/linux
tar xvfz aic7xxx.src.tar.gz
patch -p1 < 2.4.0.diffs
Only diffs for 2.4.0 are currently provided. As more community
testing is completed, patches for additional kernel revisions will
be made available. Driver update disks will be provided as soon
as the driver goes into Beta testing.
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