Return to BSD News archive
Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!bunyip.cc.uq.oz.au!munnari.oz.au!news.Hawaii.Edu!ames!agate!howland.reston.ans.net!xlink.net!zib-berlin.de!uni-paderborn.de!urmel.informatik.rwth-aachen.de!news.rhrz.uni-bonn.de!rrz.uni-koeln.de!RRZ.Uni-Koeln.DE!RRZ.Uni-Koeln.DE!news From: se@fileserv1.MI.Uni-Koeln.DE (Stefan Esser) Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd Subject: Re: PCI-NCR support Date: 17 Jun 1994 14:57:08 GMT Organization: Institute for Mathematics, University of Cologne, Germany Lines: 103 Distribution: world Message-ID: <2tsdk4INN1t99@rs1.rrz.Uni-Koeln.DE> References: <5QpLgqVjoRB@subloch.ruessel.sub.org> <1994Jun16.151424.20911@cm.cf.ac.uk> NNTP-Posting-Host: fileserv1.mi.uni-koeln.de In article <1994Jun16.151424.20911@cm.cf.ac.uk>, paul@myrddin.isl.cf.ac.uk (Paul) writes: |> In article <5QpLgqVjoRB@subloch.ruessel.sub.org>, |> Stefan Huerter <maulwurf@subloch.ruessel.sub.org> wrote: |> >Is there any developement for the PCI-NCR SCSI Chip, for supporting |> >FreeBSD? |> |> I think Nate's working or planning to work on it, so yes but no |> idea when it'll be ready. |> |> It's not going to be in the upcoming 1.1.5 release and the 2.0 release, |> which is going to be 4.4 based, may be a while so perhaps we'll have |> support by then. Well, its not yet on full sale :), but there is a PCI SCSI driver, which might make it into FreeBSD 1.1.5 ! We (<wolf@dentaro.GUN.de> and me) worked on it over the last few month. It is in heavy use on a mail/news server (that is at times used for software development as well) for some time now. It has been tested (by us and a few beta testers) with Seagate, DEC and Fujitsu disks, a QIC tape, a Toshiba CD-ROM and a HP1533A DDS2-DAT (this all due to Julian Elischer's excellent hardware independent SCSI code, that supports all these devices ...) on i486 and Pentium motherboards. We got mail from a member of the FreeBSD core team, in which he asked, whether the driver is ready for inclusion into FreeBSD 1.1.5. We think it is and will make a release version over the weekend. But whether it really will become part of 1.1.5, I don't know. But you are invited to get it from us now and use it with 386BSD or FreeBSD (probably under NetBSD as well with only minor changes, don't you want to give it a try ? :). It contains all the required functionality, but we care more for stability than for best performance right now. Performance will be further improved over the next few weeks. It is already much faster than all the ISA (and most EISA) SCSI host adapters, anyway. To cleanly support the NCR 53c810, there had to be some code added to the kernel, that knows about PCI in general. (There is now a 'pci' bus type in configure, but we choose to send a version to beta testers, that works with the original 'config' command to keep changes to existing software small). This 'pci' bus code is designed to be used the same as the 'isa' bus support code, ie. it is not restricted to find and initialize and map the NCR, but could do the same for other PCI boards. Only one beta tester, had problems getting his disk drives to work reliably with our driver (on a Pentium system), but there seems to be some kind of a hardware problem (eg. termination, cable), since there are parity errors being reported. We are now testing the synchronous transfer negotiation (its implemented in our version, but hasn't been released to beta testers, yet). Tagged command queuing is in as well, but not yet really used for improved throughput. We are now doing some clean up and consider the driver ready for release, but there might be unknown problems with certain motherboards, or the non intel PCI chipsets that will be on the market within a few weeks. Since the only way to check for these is problem reports, we would like to see the driver being tested on any motherboard around. We know it works well on ASUS motherboards, don't know what other hardware it has been used on. It seems to work on a Pentium system as well (it talks to the disk drive, but can't be really used because of parity errors, doesn't look like a driver problem at all ...). I'm not sending this on behalf of the FreeBSD core team, just to let everybody who is interested in buying a PCI board know, that there is a driver, and that this driver is ready to use. We would like to get more feedback (we like success stories best :). I can make a FreeBSD-1.1-Release GENERIC kernel available via anon.FTP, if you want to check it out, but don't want to patch your kernel sources. If you use an IDE boot disk, just copy the GENERIC kernel to that drive, boot and mount a SCSI disk using the NCR. If you have an Adaptec now, you can write the PCI kernel onto your SCSI drive, connect that to the NCR and off you go with PCI SCSI (ought to work with other SCSI host adapters as well, but we didn't try it). Its that simple! If it doesn't find your PCI controller at boot time, then we would like to know the boot messages and the output of a test command (ncrstat), so that we can look for the reason. Requests for a patch kit with the NCR driver sources are best sent to Wolfgang Stanglmeier (Wolf@Dentaro.GUN.De), requests for FTP access to a FreeBSD-1.1R kernel with PCI support to my address (see below). -- Stefan Esser Internet: <se@MI.Uni-Koeln.DE> Mathematisches Institut Tel: +49 221 4706010 Universitaet zu Koeln FAX: +49 221 4705160 Weyertal 80 50931 Koeln