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#1 (**permalink**) 02-22-2008, 12:03 PM

On Fri, 20 Jan 2006 12:19:08 +1000, David Gwynne wrote:

>On 20/01/2006, at 11:18 AM, David Rhodus wrote:
>> Is there a reason one couldn't just port the driver from FreeBSD ?
>
>The freebsd driver has nothing in it to help us towards bioctl
>support for 3ware controllers.
>
>bio is all about having a single tool in userland to manage a diverse
>set of RAID controllers, with the smarts for dealing with the
>different controllers in the kernel driver. This can be compared to
>using ifconfig to manage and control the huge number of different
>network interfaces that are out there. ifconfig issues a generic
>request to the kernel and the driver deals with making it happen for
>that particular card.
>
>The freebsd idea of support for a raid controller is to open up a
>massive hole for a (vendor supplied and closed binary) userland tool
>to talk directly to the hardware with. The kernel is dumb and just
>passes messages around. To continue the comparison to ifconfig, if
>you took this approach to configuring your network card you would
>need to install a binary from the manufacturer of your network card
>and use that to change the ip address on your interface. For added
>fun the ifconfig tool from each vendor would work differently to each
>other and they would all have different terminology for the same things.
>
>bioctl is the ifconfig of raid controllers. The whole point of it is
>to provide an abstract interface on top of your hardware. This
>approach of abstracting things obviously works well for network cards
>and I see no reason for RAID to be any different. Can someone please
>explain to me what is so special about a RAID controller that
>prevents us from doing it? Why should we support these binary tools
>when they're the wrong way to do this?
>
>dlg
>
>

That is <so> beautifully and clearly written that it deserves a place
in an FAQ that includes a "Why doesn't OpenBSD use the $OTHER_OS method
of supporting $MY_HARDWARE that is not presently usable on OpenBSD?"
question.

I knew all that but I doubt I could have stated it as eloquently.

Thanks,
Rod/

From the land "down under": Australia.
Do we look <umop apisdn> from up over?

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