@(#)README 1.19 94/11/30 jda AHA274x/284x/294x DRIVER *** THIS SHOULD BE CONSIDERED BETA SOFTWARE *** BACKGROUND & LIMITATIONS For various reasons, we ended up with one of these cards under the impression that support was soon forthcoming. In mid-May, I asked Scott Ferris (the official person who's supposed to be writing this driver) what documentation he used, _finally_ got it from Adaptec, and started writing this driver. It is now at what I would consider a stable state - it runs our news server and is battered by SCSI requests 24 hours a day without dying. There are a few devices it reportedly doesn't like working with - those are being sorted out. Due to some unexpected equipment loans, I am able to support this at least for the time being. YOU MUST HAVE THE BIOS ENABLED OR THIS WILL NOT WORK. The BIOS extracts some configuration information that I cannot get to portably yet, as well as provides some self-tests which this driver does not attempt to duplicate. Scott's driver development is stalled for now, and after discussions with him, this is now officially out of "pre-alpha" status and into beta until the remaining device problems can be resolved. The latest patches can be obtained via anonymous ftp from ftp.cpsc.ucalgary.ca in /pub/systems/linux/aha274x. It supports EISA 274x, VL-bus 284x, and PCI 294x, either single or twin-bus cards (but not the second SCSI bus of twin cards - see aha274x.c), and supports disconnection, synchronous SCSI, and scatter-gather. Unlike previous versions, abort() and reset() are now implemented, and both hosts.c and aha274x.c should give a clean compile. Code is now present to detect parity errors, but has not been tested. Wide cards are not yet supported. I wrote this using a 1.0.9 kernel. Unfortunately, I'm getting tired of #ifdef'ing everything to handle two or three different evolutionary steps in the SCSI kernel code, so I've upgraded my system to 1.1.49, and will only leave in code to support versions from about 1.1.45 onward. Thanks to patches supplied by Mark Olson , this driver will now work with the 284x series (the VL-bus version of this card). The 294x (PCI-bus) support is based on patches sent to me by Mark Olson and Alan Hourihane . Under protest, this driver is subject to the GPL - see the file COPYING for details. Thanks to the following people for bug fixes/code improvements (also thanks to the people who have sent me feedback): "David F. Carlson" Jimen Ching mday@artisoft.com (Matt Day) "Dean W. Gehnert" Darcy Grant Alan Hourihane isely@fncrd8.fnal.gov (Mike Isely) Mike Jerger tm@netcom.com (Toshiyasu Morita) neal@interact.org (Neal Norwitz) Mark Olson map@europa.ecn.uoknor.edu (Michael A. Parker) Thomas Scheunemann Eric Youngdale Special thanks to Drew Eckhardt for fielding my questions about synchronous negotiation. Steffen Moeller sent me installation instructions which were previously included in this README. David Pirie was nice enough to loan me his 2842 card for a week so I could track down one bug, as well as his CD-ROM drive later, and also thanks to Doug Fortune at Riley's Data Share in Calgary, who arranged a long-term loan of a 2842 board for further work. Many thanks to the fearless prerelease testers! Dean Gehnert has been building Slackware boot disks for the driver, which are available from ftp.cpsc.ucalgary.ca in /pub/systems/linux/aha274x/slackware_boot. Carl Riches has set up a mailing list for aic7xxx driver development. To subscribe, send a message to aic7770-list-request@poplar1.cfr.washington.edu with a message body of: subscribe AIC7770-LIST Please direct questions and discussions to that list instead of me. When sending bug reports, please include a description of your hardware, the release numbers displayed by the driver at boot time, and as accurate a facsimile of any error message you're mailing about. John Aycock aycock@cpsc.ucalgary.ca