Re: Promise SATA driver

[Jeff Garzik <jgarzik@pobox.com>]

Henrik Gustafsson wrote:
> I happen to have such a card in a computer here. Right now it's not used
> for anything in particular (waiting for things to stabilising a bit) so
> I can test out patches without worrying about any data on it, so feel
> free to suggest things to try.
> 
> Is there any active development done on it?

Well, the basic SX4 SATA driver is pretty much done.  There is one 
bugfix I need to merge for PCI-X, but that's it.

Unfortunately, it is a bit slower than average since every request must 
bounce through RAM first, with no queueing.

Using the on-board DIMM as a write-through cache would boost performance 
significantly.


> My current working conditions (and lack of specs for the card) prevents me
> from doing much work on it myself atm, but is there perhaps another way of
> following the development on that part a bit more closely?
> 
> I have done my (small, but still... :) ) share of driver development and
> low-level coding (company I work for makes me write code for their embedded
> devices and sometimes drivers for the PC-interfaces) so I might just be
> able to pitch in with an idea or two.

Well, the specs are under NDA but are available from Promise.

However...  if you want to tackle creating the write-through cache, that 
shouldn't require any specs at all.  If you are knowledgeable enough to 
create generic write-through cache code for an ATA drive, that's 
sufficient :)

	Jeff