Switchover to CAM ATA?

Alexander Motin mav at FreeBSD.org
Tue Apr 27 11:41:07 UTC 2010


Gavin Atkinson wrote:
> 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.

CAM allows every SIM driver to report several arbitrary string values,
describing driver and hardware. They are almost unused now. I don't see
much problems in exporting them to GEOM and making tasting method to
analyze them.

-- 
Alexander Motin


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