Re: [PATCH 1/4] sas: add flag for locally attached PHYs

[Andrew Patterson <andrew.patterson@hp.com>]

On Fri, 2005-10-21 at 11:06 +0200, Arjan van de Ven wrote:
> On Thu, 2005-10-20 at 18:01 -0600, Andrew Patterson wrote:
> 
> > Yes, CSMI should have had more Linux input when it was developed.  The
> > no-new IOCTL policy certainly came as a surprise to the authors. Still,
> > there doesn't seem to be any other usable cross-platform interface that
> > is acceptable to the linux community (or at least to Christoph)'s corner
> > of it).  My personal preference is to hide this stuff in a library, so
> > the kernel implementation is hidden. But even a library needs an
> > underlying kernel implementation.
> 
> 
> but why didn't CSMI specify the library interface then? If it did that,
> then none of the "ioctls are deprecated for 3 years now" would have come
> as a surprise. Or rather, it maybe would have, but it wouldn't have
> mattered to the management app.
> 

I asked one of the authors, Steve Fairchild, about this.  He said that
they had had a bad experience with HBAAPI, the FC library.  They had a
lot of problems with vendors keeping the library up to date, multiple
vendors shipping multiple incompatible versions, etc.  I wasn't entirely
convinced, since they seem to have just replaced one set of problems for
another.

Andrew