Re: [PATCH] enclosure: add support for enclosure services

[Kristen Carlson Accardi <kristen.c.accardi@intel.com>]

On Tue, 12 Feb 2008 12:45:35 -0600
James Bottomley <James.Bottomley@HansenPartnership.com> wrote:

> On Tue, 2008-02-12 at 10:22 -0800, Kristen Carlson Accardi wrote:
> > I apologize for taking so long to review this patch.  I obviously
> > agree wholeheartedly with Luben.  The problem I ran into while
> > trying to design an enclosure management interface for the SATA
> > devices is that there is all this vendor defined stuff.  For
> > example, for the AHCI LED protocol, the only "defined" LED is
> > 'activity'.  For LED2 and LED3 it is up to hardware vendors to
> > define these.  For SGPIO there's all kinds of ways for hw vendors
> > to customize.  I felt that it was going to be a maintainance
> > nightmare to have to keep track of various vendors enclosure
> > implementations in the ahci driver, and that it'd be better to just
> > have user space libraries take care of that.  Plus, that way a
> > vendor doesn't have to get a patch into the kernel to get their new
> > spiffy wizzy bang blinky lights working (think of how long it takes
> > something to even get into a vendor kernel, which is what these
> > guys care about...).  So I'm still not sold on having an enclosure
> > abstraction in the kernel - at least for the SATA controllers.
> 
> Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't the original AHCI enclosure patch
> expose activity LEDs via sysfs?

You are sort of wrong.  we exposed a sysfs entry to enable sofware
controlled activity LED, then the driver was responsible for turning it
on and off. (blech, I know, but some vendors want this feature).

> 
> I'm not saying there aren't a lot of non standard pieces that need to
> be activated by direct commands or other user activated protocol.  I
> am saying there are a lot of standard pieces that we could do with
> showing in a uniform manner.
> 
> The pieces I think are absolutely standard are
> 
> 1. Actual enclosure presence (is this device in an enclosure)
> 2. Activity LED, this seems to be a feature of every enclosure.
> 
> I also think the following are reasonably standard (based on the fact
> that most enclosure standards recommend but don't require this):
> 
> 3. Locate LED (for locating the device).  Even if you only have an
> activity LED, this is usually done by flashing the activity LED in a
> well defined pattern.
> 4. Fault.  this is the least standardised of the lot, but does seem to
> be present in about every enclosure implementation.
> 
> All I've done is standardise these four pieces ... the services
> actually take into account that it might not be possible to do
> certain of these (like fault).
> 
> James
> 
> 

I understand what you are trying to do - I guess I just doubt the value
you've added by doing this.  I think that there's going to be so much
customization that system vendors will want to add, that they are going
to wind up adding a custom library regardless, so standardising those
few things won't buy us anything.