PDC20268 TX2 support?

PDC20268 TX2 support?

[Chris Abbey]

Back in February someone else asked about support for Promise's
cards, and Alan mentioned that it would probably merge in around
the 2.4.19 timeframe. I'm curious what level of support folks are
expecting? Just basic IDE, or support for the hardware raid features?
I'm getting a bit sick of rebooting to a back level kernel inorder
to pull data from their raid, and even more sick of the hard locks
that only occur when I have their binary module inserted. (please
avoid the flame wars about how dirty a binary only module is, I'm
well aware of that, but I live in the real world and have a lot of
data one of their controllers. :(  )

-- 
Never make a technical decision based upon the politics of the situation.
Never make a political decision based upon technical issues.
The only place these realms meet is in the mind of the unenlightened.
			-- Geoffrey James, The Zen of Programming

Re: PDC20268 TX2 support?

[Andre Hedrick]

On Sat, 20 Apr 2002, Chris Abbey wrote:
> -- 
> Never make a technical decision based upon the politics of the situation.
> Never make a political decision based upon technical issues.
> The only place these realms meet is in the mind of the unenlightened.
> 			-- Geoffrey James, The Zen of Programming

Obviously a book I should have read :-/
Otherwise these drivers would have been included some time back.

Cheers,

Andre Hedrick
LAD Storage Consulting Group

Re: PDC20268 TX2 support?

[Alan Cox]

> the 2.4.19 timeframe. I'm curious what level of support folks are
> expecting? Just basic IDE, or support for the hardware raid features?

What hardware raid features ? 

AFAIK their only cards with hardware raid features are the supertrak 100 and
SX6000.

Alan

Re: PDC20268 TX2 support?

[Chris Abbey]

Today, Alan Cox wrote:
> > the 2.4.19 timeframe. I'm curious what level of support folks are
> > expecting? Just basic IDE, or support for the hardware raid features?
>
> What hardware raid features ?

The FastTraK 100 TX2 has hardware raid (stripe/mirror) support, they
have a binary only driver (scsi/ft.o) which presents this array as
a scsi device... this is the level of function I was hoping was being
integrated.

> AFAIK their only cards with hardware raid features are the supertrak 100 and
> SX6000.

The fasttrak also has hardware raid, while it works, it works realtively
well.

The current 2.4.18 code recognizes the card and provides vanilla IDE
access to the drives, unfortunately that isn't much use unless someone
wants to try and RE their block allocation on the disks... a decidedly
non-trivial endeavour I can assure you. ;(

-- 
Never make a technical decision based upon the politics of the situation.
Never make a political decision based upon technical issues.
The only place these realms meet is in the mind of the unenlightened.
			-- Geoffrey James, The Zen of Programming

Re: PDC20268 TX2 support?

[Arjan van de Ven]

Chris Abbey wrote:
> 
> Today, Alan Cox wrote:
> > > the 2.4.19 timeframe. I'm curious what level of support folks are
> > > expecting? Just basic IDE, or support for the hardware raid features?
> >
> > What hardware raid features ?
> 
> The FastTraK 100 TX2 has hardware raid (stripe/mirror) support, they
> have a binary only driver (scsi/ft.o) which presents this array as
> a scsi device... this is the level of function I was hoping was being
> integrated.

that is not hardware raid but software raid.

> 
> > AFAIK their only cards with hardware raid features are the supertrak 100 and
> > SX6000.
> 

> The current 2.4.18 code recognizes the card and provides vanilla IDE
> access to the drives, unfortunately that isn't much use unless someone
> wants to try and RE their block allocation on the disks... a decidedly
> non-trivial endeavour I can assure you. ;(

It seems you missed the ATARAID stuff in the ide config..

Re: PDC20268 TX2 support?

[Chris Abbey]

Today, Arjan van de Ven wrote:
> that is not hardware raid but software raid.

Ya know, I was seriously doubting that this thing was really hardware
raid, why else would they not want to release their driver? ;)

> It seems you missed the ATARAID stuff in the ide config..

hrm. Actually I saw it and didn't think it applied... I'll go do some
more digging. Thanks for the pointer.

-- 
Never make a technical decision based upon the politics of the situation.
Never make a political decision based upon technical issues.
The only place these realms meet is in the mind of the unenlightened.
			-- Geoffrey James, The Zen of Programming

Re: PDC20268 TX2 support?

[Alan Cox]

> 
> The fasttrak also has hardware raid, while it works, it works realtively
> well.

I believe its software. Its just concealed from the OS (windows)

> The current 2.4.18 code recognizes the card and provides vanilla IDE
> access to the drives, unfortunately that isn't much use unless someone
> wants to try and RE their block allocation on the disks... a decidedly
> non-trivial endeavour I can assure you. ;(

We have some ata raid support (drivers/ide/ataraid*) because people are
working on this.

Re: PDC20268 TX2 support?

[Nicolae P. Costescu]

At 10:58 AM 4/23/2002 +0100, Alan Cox wrote:
> >
> > The fasttrak also has hardware raid, while it works, it works realtively
> > well.
>
>I believe its software. Its just concealed from the OS (windows)

Definitely software raid w/some bios support, as are the Highpoint (HPT37x) 
controllers.

****************************************************
Nicolae P. Costescu, Ph.D.  / Senior Developer
Stronghold Technologies
46040 Center Oak Plaza, Suite 160 / Sterling, Va 20166
Tel: 571-434-1472 / Fax: 571-434-1478

Re: PDC20268 TX2 support?

[Chris Abbey]

Today, Mark Hahn wrote:
> are you sure it's not already in there?  afaik, promise makes

positive.

> three categories of cards: straight ide, fake-raid (just bios
> level software raid), and i2o raid (hardware, but disgustingly expensive and
> slow as well.)  are you referring to the latter?

hrm, I dunno which of the last two the fasttrak 100 tx2 is... any guess?

> i2o is basically
[...]
>   in short, inherently fragile.

heh, an apt description... I'd put my bet on this without any
better data.

-- 
Never make a technical decision based upon the politics of the situation.
Never make a political decision based upon technical issues.
The only place these realms meet is in the mind of the unenlightened.
			-- Geoffrey James, The Zen of Programming

Re: PDC20268 TX2 support?

[Nicolae P. Costescu]

Fasttrak tx2 (we have lots of them) and things like Highpoint RocketRaid 
133 really are not hardware raid, from what I understand. They have some 
bios assist functions but the CPU does a lot of the work.

3ware makes hardware raid cards. We switched to them - you can get a nice 2 
channel one that blows the Fastrak tx2 and RocketRaid 133 away on 
performance for $145  ($245 for the 4 channel 2 meg cache raid 1/10/5/jbod 
model). My simple write 2 gig read 2 gig benchmark ran 50% faster  with the 
3ware product than with the other 2 products.  Performance increases were 
seen on KT133A athlon, i845 p4, and AMD MPX dual athlon systems. And the 
3ware product has full driver source, and obviously full kernel support (we 
use the drivers that are part of the 2.4.18 kernel). Not to mention the 
3ware people know linux. We were able to ask them questions that would send 
Promise and Highpoint tech support people running.

We had to switch to 3ware because Promise and Highpoint wouldn't provide a 
driver for anything other than 2.4.2/2.4.7 and wouldn't provide source. 
Glad we did all around.

At 12:33 PM 4/20/2002 -0500, Chris Abbey wrote:
>Today, Alan Cox wrote:
> > > the 2.4.19 timeframe. I'm curious what level of support folks are
> > > expecting? Just basic IDE, or support for the hardware raid features?
> >
> > What hardware raid features ?
>
>The FastTraK 100 TX2 has hardware raid (stripe/mirror) support, they
>have a binary only driver (scsi/ft.o) which presents this array as
>a scsi device... this is the level of function I was hoping was being
>integrated.
>
> > AFAIK their only cards with hardware raid features are the supertrak 
> 100 and
> > SX6000.
>
>The fasttrak also has hardware raid, while it works, it works realtively
>well.
>
>The current 2.4.18 code recognizes the card and provides vanilla IDE
>access to the drives, unfortunately that isn't much use unless someone
>wants to try and RE their block allocation on the disks... a decidedly
>non-trivial endeavour I can assure you. ;(
>
>--
>Never make a technical decision based upon the politics of the situation.
>Never make a political decision based upon technical issues.
>The only place these realms meet is in the mind of the unenlightened.
>                         -- Geoffrey James, The Zen of Programming
>
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****************************************************
Nicolae P. Costescu, Ph.D.  / Senior Developer
Stronghold Technologies
46040 Center Oak Plaza, Suite 160 / Sterling, Va 20166
Tel: 571-434-1472 / Fax: 571-434-1478