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From: Terry Kennedy <terry@spcunb.spc.edu>
Subject: Re: BSDi + AHA2944W + Eclipse RAID
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Date: Sun, 17 Nov 1996 10:56:56 GMT
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In comp.unix.bsd.bsdi.misc Anthony Talltree <aad@nwnet.net> wrote:
> >-) The adaptec cards are not the main target which is supportet by BSDi.
> > Read the hardware compatibilty lists
> Both BSDI's published list and what they told me in response to a support
> ticket are inaccurate.
Eh? As far as I can tell the documentation has correctly described the
support at the time each release has been shipped. BusLogic support has
always been better than Adaptec support, though lots of the Adaptec boards
are now supported. I still like the BusLogic products, though.
You're not still talking about the wide-mode support (the "wide control-
lers are only supported in narrow mode" paragraph), are you? I told you way
back when that the wide BusLogics operated in wide mode, and that the only
restriction on them was that all SCSI ID's had to be in the range 0-7 (ID's
8 to 15 weren't detected). I since fixed that, as well as some of the cosmet-
ic reporting problems, and you should see these changes in the forthcoming
release.
I also contacted BSDI about your wide mode comments and made sure that they
knew the status of BusLogic wide mode support in BSD/OS 2.x. I don't have any
non-ISA Adaptec cards, so I couldn't (and still can't) tell you about them.
> > I'm pretty sure, that my systems provided with three SCSI controllers
> > will show up a better performance.
> Go ahead -- list an exact configuration where three SCSI controllers actually
> work reliably. I've been trying to do it for the better part of a year.
I have no reason to believe that this wouldn't work, assuming you had a
motherboard that arbitrated the bus properly (Neptune-based boards such as
the Intel Plato had a problem when more than 2 bus masters are installed).
The only problem I can see is that the newer BusLogic cards only offer the
"primary" (330) and "alternate" (334) address settings for "ISA compatible
port" in their setup menu, so the third (and so on) cards would need a "-dev
bha2 port=6000" (or whereever your BIOS configures it) line in boot.default
or the kernel config file.
This could be fixed by probing the PCI space for BusLogic cards, as is cur-
rently done for things like the de Ethernet cards. If there's a big demand
for this it could be added.
I'll attach the BusLogic SCSI notes that I sent to BSDI when I sent them
my bha driver changes. Of course, they may change the code I sent them and/or
these notes before the release.
> > you want to use ? Or do you think about the ccd(4) driver ?
> BSD/OS doesn't include ccd. 2.1 includes the cd driver, which is really
> crufty. 2.2 aka 3.0 is claimed to come with a new striping driver if/when
> it ships.
cd == ccd - the name was changed. The code is very similar to that which
shipped with 4.4-Lite. The big problem is that the cd device isn't config-
urable at runtime - you have to build the kernel with the member partitions
pre-defined.
You seem to doubt that 3.0 will ship - as far as I know it's in beta now.
From what I've heard/seen, I think many users will be quite happy with the
new stripe driver.
> >-) There are supported RAID systems.
> ^ very expensive
If you need the sort of features they provide, they're worth it. Most of
the requests for striping on BSD/OS seem to come from news admins wanting
to stripe their spools. For things like that, parity disks and data recov-
ery aren't usually high on the priority list. (Who was it that said archiv-
ing Usenet was like recycling toilet paper? The same goes for backing it up
on RAID boxes).
There are 3 choices for striping/concatenation/RAID: device-based, control-
ler-based, and host-based. Device-based looks like a regular SCSI disk and
should work on any BSD/OS box. I've heard of several controller-based products
which have drivers for BSD/OS (I think DPT is one). Host-based doesn't require
any additional hardware, but has some limits (doing anything fancier than sim-
ple striping or concatenation will chew up CPU, and you can't boot from a
stripeset).
> >-) BSD/OS is a real professional and commercial unix system.
> Albeit with some major faults -- eg., no real patch management.
The patch situation has gotten better since the 1.0 days. Just as the install
/ admin tools have become more user-friendly, I expect the patch system will
also evolve.
> >-) Read the great papers written by Paul Vixie about good hardware for
> > BSD/OS systems.
> They're out of date, though, and don't address large configurations.
True, but I (and other folks) have posted here about what we're using. Once
3.0 ships I'll have a bit more to say about my configuration. I also hope to
set up a set of web pages about my hardware preferences for BSD/OS.
Terry Kennedy Operations Manager, Academic Computing
terry@spcvxa.spc.edu St. Peter's College, Jersey City, NJ USA
+1 201 915 9381 (voice) +1 201 435-3662 (FAX)
Here's my BusLogic/BSDI SCSI notes:
Notes on BSD/OS 2.2 SCSI suppport (to be sent back to BSDI)
[coding questions deleted]
3) The manual and man pages should have the following notes:
o We only detect bha-type adapters in "ISA compatible port address" mode
at this point. Older bha adapters enable their ISA compatible ports by
default, but the newer ones don't. I may lift this restriction in a
later update. Since there are only 2 ISA compatible port choices in the
bha setup (Primary/330 and Alternate/334) this limits you to 2 bha
adapters per system. Update: not really - you can see where your BIOS
configures the cards in PCI space and then do "-dev bha2 port=6000" in
/etc/boot.default (assuming your motherboards puts the 3rd card at 6000)
o Due to the way PCI autoconfiguration works, if you have multiple bha
adapters, you should install the newer one so that it is scanned first
by your system's BIOS. Newer models can be used to configure older models
but the reverse is not true. Having the newer card scanned first ensures
you can configure both cards. Note that the BIOS can only boot from disks
on the bha adapter that scanned first. This may mean some juggling of
disks in some cases. For example, assume you have a wide/differential
controller like the BT-958D and a regular controller like the BT-946C.
The above configuration guidelines would have you install the BT-958D so
it is scanned first, but that would mean you'd need a differential drive
as your boot disk. You could swap the slot positions of the BT-958D and
the BT-946C, which would allow you to boot from a non-differential drive,
but you would no longer be able to use the BIOS setup utility to config-
ure the BT-958D. These are all BIOS/adapter limitation as BSD/OS is not
running at this point.
o The bha driver will use wide mode if the controller, cabling, and drives
all support wide mode.
o Wide SCSI can support up to 64 LUNs per ID, while regular SCSI can only
support 8 LUNs per ID. The bha driver currently supports only 8 LUNs per
ID even in wide mode. Most SCSI devices don't provide more than one LUN
anyway. If there is demand for 64-LUN support, we can add it.
o If you receive a message during booting indicating that you need "a newer
version of BTDOSM.SYS", make sure you are a) using the aha boot blocks and
not the BIOS boot blocks, and b) that "DOS support for disks > 1GB" is dis-
abled in the BusLogic BIOS setup menu.
o In order to boot from a disk other than ID 0, you need to use the BIOS boot
blocks. The BIOS boot blocks support all ID's on wide BusLogic controllers.
o Transfer rates are report in MT/sec (megatransfers per second). For normal
SCSI devices, this is megabytes/second. A wide drive has 16 data lines, so
10MT/sec is 20 megabytes/second on wide drives. Update: this has been
changed back to MB/sec. It is assumed that all wide disks are wide-16 (I
have never seen a wide-32 disk).