Re: [RFC] aic94xx: attaching to the sas transport class

[Mike Anderson <andmike@us.ibm.com>]

James Bottomley <James.Bottomley@SteelEye.com> wrote:
> This fairly minimal patch correctly attaches the aic94xx driver to the
> SAS transport class (The driver is available from
> 
> www.kernel.org/git/jgarzik/sas-2.6
> 
> ).  Unfortunately, the driver itself still has the following critical
> issues
> 
> 1. Discovery order is non-deterministic (it starts one thread per port,
> so the threads race for discovery)
> 

The issue also results in the device discovery not completing by the time
the module load completes resulting in the initrd not finding the boot
disk
http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=6045

I agree that we need a solution for this. Should the solution be in the
LLDDs.I thought previous comments was that we wanted this fixed outside
the kernel in user space. Though I have not seen any enabled support in
initrds or support in the initrd bins.

This appears to not only be an issue with aic94xx as it appears this could
happen with some of the fc transport LLDDs.

-andmike
--
Michael Anderson
andmike@us.ibm.com