26 Jun
2006
26 Jun
'06
5:28 a.m.
Chuck Guzis wrote:
On 6/26/2006 at 1:01 AM Jules Richardson wrote:
By that same measure, the same's true of the Adaptec and Emulex boards too -
but I'm not aware of useful details (such as source listings) for the ROM
contents existing anywhere. [1]
[1] customer EPROMs did exist for these boards, so the necessary info possibly
existed (at a price) - unless the custom ROMs were done by the vendor to the
customer's spec, rather than by the customer themselves.
The Xebec board seems to have a pair of 40-pin ICs and a 24-pin IC all with
Xebec part numbers; presumably one of those holds the firmware.
Assuming Identify could be added (or worked around in the kernel), that still
leaves the following two problems:
1) Whether a SCSI HBA talking to a SASI target will work. Sure, they're
electrically compatible, but I don't know if the SCSI spec includes a feature
where the HBA must detect that the target's SASI (and so missing the extra
control line pair) and automagically cope.
2) How to set up the board in software; I expect the kernel will get upset
if it can't query drive geometry at boot time - but it's going to do that as
part of driver set up, before any vendor-specific commands can be sent to the
board in order to set *it* up.
A simple SCSI adapter hanging off a PC parallel port and driven purely in
user-space would be in theory a lot easier - problem is that the PC port
doesn't quite have enough data lines. Building an ISA or PCI board is $$$, and
doing anything else (such as a USB interface) is unfortunately beyond me :-(
cheers
Jules
Out of interest, has anyone else ever managed to
persuade linux to talk
to any
of the Xebec/Omti/Emulex/Adaptec ST506-SCSI bridge boards? Most of the
boards
are SASI, or at best semi-SCSI, so Linux refuses to talk to them.
Well, the firmware on the OMTI boards is in EPROM and the CPU's a Z8--it
shouldn't be too difficult to add an IDENTIFY command to it.