Re: Aix7xxx unstable in 2.4.21-rc2? (RE: Linux 2.4.21-rc2)

From: Nicholas Wourms (nwourms@myrealbox.com)
Date: Sat May 24 2003 - 15:11:58 EST


Pascal Schmidt wrote:
On Fri, 23 May 2003 22:30:17 +0200, Willy Tarreau wrote in lkml:


By this time, there will be more and more people leaving vanilla kernel for
their machines, and using them only as a base to apply -aa, -ac, -jam, -wolk,
-** + sf.net/* + who_knows_what, and I find it a shame.


I think you overestimate the number of aic7xxx users. It's not like
99% of all 2.4 users need the driver.


I think you're smoking crack, I'd say that there are way more than 1% of the 2.4 users w/ an AIC-7XXX chipset based controller. I don't know how things are like in Germany, but around here, Adaptec is usually thought to be the mainstream choice in SCSI solutions for professional workstations and low-to-mid range servers [I Am Not A Product Market Analyst, so this is just my personal opinion based on my experiences in the VAR/Retail sector... YMMV]. Most of the popular OEM's offer some sort of SCSI option based on an AIC-7XXX series chipset for most of their non "home-use-only" lines. I can't even count how many motherboard manufactures have embedded the AIC-7XXX series chip into their motherboard to provide integrated SCSI solutions. Moreover, most of what Adaptec produces in their current core SCSI brand line (excepting DPT, etc) is based on some version of the AIC-7XXX chip. I can damn well say for sure there are more AIC-7XXX users then there are Fusion users and, as was pointed out, that code has gone through much more invasive changes to bring it up to speed.

I think the bottom line is that those of us in Adaptec-userland would very much appreciate a *working*, current driver in the next kernel release. AFAICT, the old code base that was reverted to still has some annoying "quirks", and frankly doesn't perform as well as the current driver [at least for me]. So, invasive or not, I think we ought to be "testing the code" of a driver release written by a person who is well qualified to know the ins and outs of the hardware he is writing the code for. Obviously Justin has access to a multitude of Adaptec hardware and I am quite satisfied that he has sufficiently tested his modifications to the driver. Waiting until 2.4.22, let alone 2.4.21, is actually released just seems too far down the road to be sane.

Just my $0.02 on this...

Cheers,
Nicholas


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