Tape drive support in mlx driver?

[Sandy Rutherford]

Peter,

On Tue, 8 Jun 2004 you wrote:

 > On Fri, 2004-Jun-04 22:16:53 -0700, Sandy Rutherford wrote:
 >> Are tape drives supported with the Mylex DAC RAID controllers?  I have
 >> been unable to get it to work or find anything about tape drives in
 >> the mlx documentation?

 > Tapes aren't supported by DAC960's on Compaq/HP Tru64 Unix so I
 > suspect it is non-trivial (though I vaguely recall that they were
 > supported by NT/Alpha so it may be possible).

The eXtremeRAID 1100 isn't a DAC960; it's a DAC1164P.  

Here is my understanding of the situation:

The DAC960 only supports firmware up to ver. 4.x.  However, the
DAC1164P supports firmware up to ver. 5.x.  Although, Mylex firmware
<= 4.x does not support tape drives, ver. >= 5.x supports both tape
drives and cdroms.

The mly(4) driver works for Mylex RAID controllers with firmware >=
6.x.  mly(4) does interface to the SCSI sub-system and would therefore
presumably handle tape drives.  The mlx(4) driver is for firmware <=
5.x and it does not interface to the SCSI subsystem.

So, it seems that the DAC1164P falls through the crack in the middle.

I have no idea how different the 5.x firmware is from the 6.x firmware
and whether it would be feasible to get mly(4) working with 5.x
firmware.

After an extensive search, I have not been able to find 6.x firmware
for the DAC1164P.  It seems that 5.x is the most recent available for
this controller.

Thanks,
Sandy