root/drivers/scsi/README.aha274x

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@(#)README 1.15 94/10/29 jda

AHA274x/284x DRIVER

***  THIS SHOULD BE CONSIDERED BETA SOFTWARE  ***

BACKGROUND & LIMITATIONS

For various reasons, we ended up with one of these cards under the
impression that support was soon forthcoming.  In mid-May, I asked
Scott Ferris (the official person who's supposed to be writing this
driver) what documentation he used, _finally_ got it from Adaptec,
and started writing this driver.  It is now at what I would consider
a stable state - it runs our news server and is battered by SCSI
requests 24 hours a day without dying.  There are a few devices it
reportedly doesn't like working with - those are being sorted out.  Due
to some unexpected equipment loans, I am able to support this at least
for the time being.

YOU MUST HAVE THE BIOS ENABLED OR THIS WILL NOT WORK.  The BIOS extracts
some configuration information that I cannot get to portably yet, as
well as provides some self-tests which this driver does not attempt to
duplicate.

Scott's driver development is stalled for now, and after discussions
with him, this is now officially out of "pre-alpha" status and into
beta until the remaining device problems can be resolved.  The latest
patches can be obtained via anonymous ftp from ftp.cpsc.ucalgary.ca in
/pub/systems/linux/aha274x.

It supports both EISA 274x and VL-bus 284x, either single or twin-bus cards
(but not the second SCSI bus of twin cards - see aha274x.c), and supports
disconnection, synchronous SCSI, and scatter-gather.  Unlike previous
versions, abort() and reset() are now implemented, and both hosts.c and
aha274x.c should give a clean compile.  Code is now present to detect parity
errors, but has not been tested.

I wrote this using a 1.0.9 kernel.  Unfortunately, I'm getting tired of
#ifdef'ing everything to handle two or three different evolutionary steps
in the SCSI kernel code, so I've upgraded my system to 1.1.49, and will
only leave in code to support versions from about 1.1.45 onward.

Thanks to patches supplied by Mark Olson <molson@tricord.com>, this driver
will now work with the 284x series (the VL-bus version of this card).  The
294x (PCI-bus) is being worked on, and initial support for it will be ready
soon.

Under protest, this driver is subject to the GPL - see the file
COPYING for details.

Thanks to the following people for bug fixes/code improvements (also
thanks to the people who have sent me feedback):

        "David F. Carlson" <dave@ee.rochester.edu>
        Jimen Ching <jiching@wiliki.eng.hawaii.edu>
        mday@artisoft.com (Matt Day)
        "Dean W. Gehnert" <deang@ims.com>
        Darcy Grant <darcy@cpsc.ucalgary.ca>
        Alan Hourihane <alanh@fairlite.demon.co.uk>
        isely@fncrd8.fnal.gov (Mike Isely)
        Mike Jerger <jerger@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu>
        tm@netcom.com (Toshiyasu Morita)
        neal@interact.org (Neal Norwitz)
        Mark Olson <molson@tricord.com>
        map@europa.ecn.uoknor.edu (Michael A. Parker)
        Thomas Scheunemann <thomas@dagobert.uni-duisburg.de>

Special thanks to Drew Eckhardt <drew@kinglear.cs.Colorado.EDU> for
fielding my questions about synchronous negotiation.  Steffen Moeller
<smoe0024@rz.uni-hildesheim.de> sent me installation instructions which
were previously included in this README.

David Pirie <pirie@cpsc.ucalgary.ca> was nice enough to loan me his
2842 card for a week so I could track down one bug, as well as his
CD-ROM drive later, and also thanks to Doug Fortune at Riley's Data Share
in Calgary, who arranged a long-term loan of a 2842 board for further work.

Many thanks to the fearless prerelease testers!  Dean Gehnert has been
building Slackware boot disks for the driver, which are available from
ftp.cpsc.ucalgary.ca in /pub/systems/linux/aha274x/slackware_boot.

Carl Riches <cgr@poplar1.cfr.washington.edu> has set up a mailing list
for aic7xxx driver development.  To subscribe, send a message to
aic7770-list@poplar1.cfr.washington.edu with a message body of:

    subscribe AIC7770-LIST <your name here, without the angle brackets>

Please direct questions and discussions to that list instead of me.  When
sending bug reports, please include a description of your hardware, the
release numbers displayed by the driver at boot time, and as accurate a
facsimile of any error message you're mailing about.

John Aycock
aycock@cpsc.ucalgary.ca

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