Re: [PATCH] New QStor SATA/RAID Driver for 2.6.9-rc2

[Jeff Garzik <jgarzik@pobox.com>]

Mark Lord wrote:
> Currently on Linux, that interface is called "SCSI".
> I think it might not be unreasonable to gradually evolve
> the SCSI host interface to include, say, a non-translating
> queuecommand() method, and associated pals.
[...]
> We practically have that already today.
> The SCSI mid-layer is a nice generic block device glue system.
> We just need perhaps to make it less SCSI-specific.


You seem to have independent reached the same conclusion I did :)

To be specific, SCSI provides LLD infrastructure that block does not:
1) infrastructure for queueing, retrying, and timing out requests
2) an error handling thread.
3) a standard method of addressing attached devices
4) a standard method of submitting raw commands from userspace

It is my goal to shift this infrastructure from SCSI to block over time. 
  There is a fair amount of queueing infrastructure now in 2.6 (part of 
#1), and Jens already has test code for #4.

I had hoped to start working on this in 2.7, but with the new dev model 
2.7 is postponed indefinitely....  so I guess I'll start working on it 
sooner rather than later :)

	Jeff