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From: juliane@belfast.dcd.wa.gov.au (Julian Elischer)
Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.development,comp.periphs.scsi
Subject: Re: Plans for Adaptec 2742?
Date: 20 Sep 1993 10:11:26 +0800
Organization: Dept of Community Development, Perth, Australia
Lines: 55
Distribution: world
Message-ID: <27j3ge$k0o@belfast.dcd.wa.gov.au>
References: <1993Sep18.164043.26737@cc.umontreal.ca> <CDKn31.FAD@world.std.com>
NNTP-Posting-Host: belfast.dcd.wa.gov.au

[all comments below are relative to [386BSD/FREEBSD/NETBSD]

In article <CDKn31.FAD@world.std.com> hd@world.std.com (HD Associates) writes:
>In article <1993Sep18.164043.26737@cc.umontreal.ca>,
>Surprenant Colin <surprenc@ceres> wrote:
>>Are there any plans to write a driver for the new Adaptec 2742? (julian?)
>
>If either of the two new Adaptec boards (one is EISA and one VL)
>support a target mode, and Adaptec will support it, I'll write a Julian
>driver for it.
>Peter

This is the situation regarding SCSI adapters at the moment:
I have driers for
aha1542, aha1742, ultrastore 14f/34f, and bustek 742/445.
There is a driver for the TNC1680 that needs someone to polish  and debug it.
(volunteers?)

There is a separate driver for the st01/tmc885 (Imbelieve they are similar)
that I have an offer to port to the scsi system.

The AHA2742 is a new design by adaptec, and in their wisdom thay have
made them TOTALLY incompatible with the old boards.

I can get no information here in Australia about these boards, and I certainly
don't have on to experiment with. If I had the programmer's reference manual
and a board, then maybe one might get written in a while (I'm busy
rewriting large chunks of the scsi system at the moment) but from what I've
heard second hand it sounds like a hard job.. This is what I have heard:

The new boards are much lower level than the old ones and the processor has
to do much more work, (this raises doubts as to it's suitability for
timesharing systems, but it's only a rumour at this time). Apparently
it has some high power procesor or something on it, so what
the f*** is it doing?

Adaptec won't release a programmer's reference that outlines register settings,
and structures, but instead insist that we BUY from them a set of
pre-written sources that we then have to port to 386bsd and THEN CAN NOT
REDISTRIBUTE with the sources to 386bsd(et al). This is about as useful
to 386bsd/linux/etc. as tits on a bull.

I'm hoping that some/all of this information is wrong.

It'd be sad to thisnk that teh 1742 was the pinacle of adaptec's achievements.


If Roy Neese can comment on these (random rumours) I'd be appreciative.

I appologize to anyone on the SCSI list if these have al been covered there
before, but I have only just got Usenet access again.

julian
(julian@dialix.oz.au, julian@dcd.wa.gov.au)