Re: ataNG

[Robert Watson <rwatson@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, 24 Oct 2003, Kip Macy wrote:

> Your approach is quite prudent. I'm not one to advocate destabilizing
> existing systems. Most of the breakage I've seen has been in atapicam
> which wasn't entirely Soren's fault. This is an integral part of the
> system so, before one even advocated its use, it would have to have
> quite a bit of testing on a wide variety of hardware. I am almost all
> SCSI in-house. The only person I know of at the moment with the
> resources to do the testing is Dave Rhodus, so it would largely be
> contingent on his interest. 

Actually, I'm not sure the comment about atapicam is strictly true: the
early revealed breakage involving atapicam had to do with API assumptions
that changed.  However, the vast majority of lasting breakage has been a
property of interrupt handling, and the nasty diversity of ATA hardware
which makes it difficult to test a driver change thoroughly without a
comprehensive effort involving literally hundreds (if not thousands) of
products :-(.  The atapicam issues relating to ATAng in 5.x appear to be
entirely resolved now, but no doubt ATA compatibility issues and tweaks
will trickle in for quite a while to come...

Robert N M Watson             FreeBSD Core Team, TrustedBSD Projects
robert@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx      Network Associates Laboratories