On Sat, Apr 17, 1999 at 04:34:01PM -0400, Thor Lancelot Simon wrote:
> On Sat, Apr 17, 1999 at 04:11:25PM -0400, Mark Levine wrote:
> [...]
> > forward to trying it out again on this platform, NetBSD was a good 
> > performer when the disk did not lock up and refuse to restart.  
> 
> FWIW, FreeBSD and Linux use basically the same NCR 53c8xx driver that we
> do.  The Linux one has been hacked on a bit more, but AFAICT all the
> same basic flaws that are in ours are still there.  And I doubt that there
> are enough people running FreeBSD on the Alpha to have learned just how
> much that driver loses yet... because of the nature of the problems withthat
> driver, making the tiniest little tweak to *anything* can make you think
> you've "fixed" or "caused" bugs.  I doubt running Linux vs. running NetBSD
> makes much difference WRT NCR driver stability _in general_, though it
> may well have in your case -- we had a situation a few weeks ago where
> one of the developers had a NCR driver problem that appeared or didn't
> appear depending on the setting of unrelated variables in his SRM!

Linux 2.2.6 has a new driver called sym53c8xx based on the ncr53c8xx
driver.  I don't know exactly what the differences are, except that
the scripts in the new driver use newer features and thus works better
or something.

The patch is at
http://www.gz.us.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernels/2.2/patch-2.2.6.gz
and the kernel is linux-2.2.6.tar.gz

-andy
-- 
Andy Isaacson adisaacs@mtu.edu adi@acm.org    Fight Spam, join CAUCE:
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