The point of I2O is that you do not need to write low level drivers
anymore. The vendors write one lowlevel driver for all OSes and you will
get that then with your adapter.
> The situation is quite the same as with SCSI today. The only decision that
> matters to us, is if the I2O protocols will be released for public use (not
> that I would doubt we would be able to reverse engineer them anyway ;-).
The I2O spec (v1.5d) was accessable for a while due to a
misconfiguration of their ftp server and has been downloaded by
heaps of people. So this should not be a problem anymore. There should
still be a numbewr of ftp/www sites where it can be downloaded.
> However AFAIK the only working I2O chipset available yet is from Intel and
> designed as a (PCI ?-)bridge, i.e. commands will probably go CPU->PCI->I2O.
> But this will probably get a direct one sometime.
DPT has their IOP hardware also ready and they produce their
SCSI controllers currently in small numbers for developers.
They are very interested in seeing I2O support in Linux and opened a
mailing list (linux-i2o@dpt.com) as a forum for all that are interested
in this topic.
Mike
"The woods are lovely, dark and deep. But I have promises to keep,
And lines to code before I sleep, And lines to code before I sleep."