SAS controllers and SATA tunneling

[Scott Long]

Andre Oppermann wrote:
> Scott Long wrote:
> 
>> Andre Oppermann wrote:
>>
>>> Does one of our SCSI-SAS controllers support multiplexors and
>>> SATA tunneling (STP)?
>>>
>>
>> No.  Adding a SAS module to the MPT driver is probably the easiest 
>> option by far.  SAS chips from Adaptec, Intel, Vitesse, and others
>> likely do not have a FreeBSD driver nor the available documentation to 
>> write a FreeBSD driver.
> 
> 
> Oops, how does our future look then?  Are we going to be restricted to
> SATA?  I'd say in 2006 all new servers will be SAS-only.  Old parallel
> SCSI is dead.
> 

Like I said, the mpt driver will be fairly easy and straight forward to 
add SAS and STP front ends.  Their chips are also likely to be very 
decent.  It's up to Vitesse/Adaptec whether or not they want to be 
relevant, though I guess that they won't care and it'll come down to 
someone slogging through a linux driver (if one is even released) to 
reverse engineer it.  Intel is somewhat of an unknown quantity, though 
my guess is that you'll see what amounts to a winmodem-like chip that 
requires a huge complex driver.

Another option would be to do what I wanted to do last year with 
extending the NDIS wrapper to cover Storport (and whatever the Longhorn 
follow-on is) so that Windows drivers can be used.

Scott