Todd Whitesel writes:
> [ I hope everyone does not mind me replying to this in the clear ]
> 
[snip]
> 	My NetBSD-1.4.1 tower at home has an adaptec AIC7880 wide SCSI
> 	controller on the motherboard, and it runs great. The problem is not
> 	Wide SCSI per se, but rather Adaptec's most recent line of wide
> 	controllers, which require much device driver work. If you're stuck
> 	with one, just run FreeBSD, it supports them already.

Right, I think this section needs clarification.  It needs to be crystal
clear that the NetBSD issue is with Adaptec 7890 type cards, not U2W or
LVD in general.  Currently the Adaptec 2940UW is probably the fasted controller NetBSD supports and it is capable of 40MB/s not the piddly 10MB/s suggested by
"narrow scsi" mentioned in the article.

AFAIK the ISP based boards support U2W/LVD under NetBSD 1.4.2, and potentially
something based on the NCR/Symbios/LSI chipset. (53c875?)

My point is that while NetBSD SCSI support is a bit behind FreeBSD, the gap is
not nearly as wide as suggested.

> 	One argument for NetBSD on the ATAPI front is that the SCSI/ATAPI
> 	code is shared, something which is possible because ATAPI is really
> 	just a sneaky way to send SCSI messages over IDE. ATAPI devices have
> 	a lot of quirks however, and the next stable release (1.4.2) knows a
> 	lot more about them.

Also, while NetBSD was a bit late in the busmaster EIDE game, the NetBSD pciide
driver is very high performance, and IMHO better than the FreeBSD "old config"
based 'wdc' version.  On lab workstations, which are highly likely to have
EIDE, even small improvements in the device drivers will boost apparent
machine performance.

> 	You could also mention that due to the advance progress on USB and
> 	the recent integration of serious CardBus/PC-Card code in NetBSD,
> 	much attention is now being devoted to hot-swapping, which is another
> 	item that Linux doesn't seem to have much of a clue about.

Good point.  I also think that mentioning the BSD NFS code, particularly
when compared to Linux in a lab environment where all machines are probably
mounting big chunks of their filesystems from a central server.

-Andrew
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Andrew Gillham                            | This space left blank
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