Switchover to CAM ATA?

[Gavin Atkinson]

On Mon, 2010-04-26 at 10:33 -0600, M. Warner Losh wrote:
> My opinion for the path forward:
> (1) Send a big heads up about the future of ataraid(5).  It will be
>     shot in the head soon, to be replaced be a bunch of geom classes
>     for each different container format.  At least that seems to be
>     the rough consensus I've seen so far.  We need worker bees to do
>     many of these classes, although much can be mined from the ataraid
>     code today.

Losing ataraid would be bad.  I suspect there are a lot of installs
using it - especially as there is no way to create any other mirror from
sysinstall.  However, I'm not actually sure that the functionality it
provides is easy to push down into GEOM.

ataraid depends on knowing a lot about the underlying hardware, in order
to know which format of metadata to use.  i.e. it needs to know that the
disks are attached to (say) a Highpoint controller.  This is especially
important when creating new ATA RAID devices, although there is so
little identifying metadata on the disks themselves that in some cases
it doesn't look like it is possible to identify or even confirm the
existence of metadata without knowing the PCI ID of the controller to
which the disks are attached.

I'm not sure I can see a way to do this from within GEOM.

Gavin