From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Andrew Patterson Subject: Re: [PATCH 1/4] sas: add flag for locally attached PHYs Date: Fri, 21 Oct 2005 11:05:36 -0600 Message-ID: <1129914336.30258.179.camel@bluto.andrew> References: <91888D455306F94EBD4D168954A9457C048F0E34@nacos172.co.lsil.com> <20051020160155.GA14296@lst.de> <4357CB03.4020400@adaptec.com> <20051020170330.GA16458@lst.de> <4357F7DE.7050004@adaptec.com> <1129852879.30258.137.camel@bluto.andrew> <1129885586.2786.12.camel@laptopd505.fenrus.org> Reply-To: andrew.patterson@hp.com Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Return-path: Received: from atlrel8.hp.com ([156.153.255.206]:45255 "EHLO atlrel8.hp.com") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S965034AbVJURFx (ORCPT ); Fri, 21 Oct 2005 13:05:53 -0400 In-Reply-To: <1129885586.2786.12.camel@laptopd505.fenrus.org> Sender: linux-scsi-owner@vger.kernel.org List-Id: linux-scsi@vger.kernel.org To: Arjan van de Ven Cc: linux-scsi@vger.kernel.org, jejb@steeleye.com, "Moore, Eric Dean" , Christoph Hellwig , Luben Tuikov 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