Re: Adaptec ICH5R-S Serial ATA RAID

Jeremy Chadwick wrote:
> As I mentioned, Soren may not have an ICH5R to test with.  If he
> doesn't, I can send him a motherboard (no CPU or RAM though) which can
> help with this department.

I do have ICH5(R) and 6300ESB boards around, but none of them uses the 
Intel RAID metadata (not even the one thats made by Intel) they all use 
Adaptec HostRAID which I have partial support for (unreleased yet).

> I think it's "too soon" to get this into RELENG_5, to be honest, unless
> things happen over the next 7-8 days.  -CURRENT is an entirely different
> story.
> 
>>From what I understand, there's been a lot of work recently on getting
> metadata support for different onboard RAID controllers.  Soren could
> comment on this...

Yes there has, but lately my efforts has concentrated on stabilizing 
things for 5.3. There are a few issues that needs to be looked at and 
that has higher priority (for me at least).

Now, one of the reason I havn't put more metadata formats in there is 
that its no longer enough to use the chip PCI ID to find out what 
metadata to look for, I know of at least 3 different formats used on SiI 
chips.
This needs some thought as we might not want to scan all disks for a 
dozen different formats.
And if more than one format is found on a disk, which one do we use ?

Another issue is that no vendors except Promise and Highpoint has 
released docs/info on how those formats are done, so each new format 
need a fair amount of reverseengineering and testing to be made at least 
semireliable.

On top of that, ata-raid.c needs a serious rewrite for other reasons. 
The way it plugs into the disks strategy routines is a hack at best. It 
also needs to be able to take advantage of those chips that can do some 
part of the RAID stuff (Promise, Marvell, AHCI).

So, there is plenty to do as usual, and I have to balance priorities 
amongst it all.

Back to the matter at hand, if this patch is going into ata-raid.c it 
will need a maintainer. Since I dont have HW with this format around  it 
wont get any testing/support from this end and will not be provided in 
the new ata-raid.c unless someone does the integration when time comes. 
We also need to have some kind of resolution to the problem with more 
than one format pr device id.

And no, this is *not* RELENG_5 material, not even close.

-- 

-Søren