From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Thomas Horsten Subject: Re: Driver for BIOS-based software RAIDs Date: Mon, 13 Oct 2003 22:38:40 +0100 Sender: linux-raid-owner@vger.kernel.org Message-ID: <200310132238.40012.thomas@horsten.com> References: <200310131921.45824.thomas@horsten.com> <200310132025.30939.thomas@horsten.com> <20031013211722.GG23916@marowsky-bree.de> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Return-path: In-Reply-To: <20031013211722.GG23916@marowsky-bree.de> Content-Disposition: inline To: Lars Marowsky-Bree , linux-raid@vger.kernel.org List-Id: linux-raid.ids On Monday 13 October 2003 22:17, Lars Marowsky-Bree wrote: > "BIOS RAIDs" is a rather sweet euphemism for "crippled pretense of > hardware RAID, which is in fact emulated by software". I've got no > problem with telling the users that what they have _is_ software RAID > and needs to be treated as such. I completely agree with you, and I will make sure my drivers print "Software RAID" all over the screen when it loads :-) Ok, at least on one line then. I'm not on a mission to justify the marketing methods of chip manufactureres. Having said that, BIOS RAID does solve a few problems inherent to software RAID's, particularly the boot process and consistency of RAID's between operating systems. I want to leverage those advantages and I think that this is best done with an autodetecting driver. > Windows doesn't use the BIOS to access the device at all; the > corresponding hardware drivers emulate that. I know, but the BIOS supports its boot up to 32-bit mode. Which means you could see the drive from DOS, etc. And putting the RAID in BIOS does have some advantages for the average PC motherboard. Best regards, Thomas