(unknown charset) Re: Updated SATA support patches for Intel ICH & Promise cards

David Schultz writes:
| On Tue, May 04, 2004, Sren Schmidt wrote:
| > Doug Ambrisko wrote:
| > >These patches have been updated to -current as of the past weekend.
| > >They increase the robustness of SATA disk errors (media errors and
| > >drive going away such as drives that spin up and down).  Also has
| > >code to support hot swap on both controllers.
| > >
| > >This is only HW support and does not address other ata/FreeBSD issues.
| > >That isn't quite right ... some ata changes have been made to avoid
| > >panics in probes etc. to support the HW changes.
| [...]
| > I'm sorry if this sounds a bit harsh, but your work conflicts pretty 
| > much head on with the way I want this to move along. However code to 
| > read/write the RAID config (AMI way I'd guess) would be welcomed as I 
| > only have the descriptions for that done, but no code yet...
| 
| The ata driver has not worked with my hardware for months, as I
| reported to you last September.  With Doug's patches, things work
| perfectly.  Therefore, I'd really appreciate it if you gave more
| consideration to his work.  I would be happy to help merge them
| with your changes if you'll allow me.

I've offered to that and have merged with his code in -current 3 times
now and posted them twice (I had to re-merge again when I cvs updated 
my tree).  I don't see the point of doing that anymore.  We will probably
just maintain our own local version so I can deal with fixing other
issues so we can ship product based on this HW when we migrate from
4.X to 5.X.  Then we will merge locally only when we need to.  Our 4.X
version has been put through our QA team's ringer.  This required fixing
some other FreeBSD issues to survive this.  Now I'm not saying my code
is perfect and having multiple sets of eyes on it is a good thing.

This will probably prevent our -stable version that has all of these
fixes and more making it into -stable.  I'm happy to help people with 
our -stable patches but they should probably realize there might not 
be a migration path to -current for a while.

Thanks for letting me know it helped you.  That's nice to hear.

Doug A.