>
> Great! Would either of you care to elaborate?
>
> Is the Linux server a Sun SPARC, or PC with some kind of
> fiber card? Was it all pretty straight-forward, or was
> there some wailing and gnashing of teeth to get it to work?
I was using Sun SPARCs, with SOC and SOC+ cards.
Using it should be straightforward, like for SSA you do
modprobe soc; modprobe pluto
>
> How does the performance of Linux/raidtools/SSA (or A5000)
> compare to Solaris/Disksuite/SSA or Solaris/VxVM/SSA?
Well, I must tell you I don't know. I don't have the luxury to have a spare
SSA or A5000 array which I can play with. I have one production SSA which
works, but I cannot play with the driver nor shut it down for performance
tests, and I could only play with A5000 in some Sun lab always for a couple
of hours, bringing there my own disk with the kernel, testing for a while
and coming back, so I reached the point where I succesfully mounted Solaris
ufs disks and created some files on it, that's about it.
But there are some issues: first, Sun SOC and SOC+ drivers download
microcode into the cards, I cannot put that microcode into our drivers
unless Sun allows me to do it (they have not yet, but it takes months), and
I was told the SOC microcode stored PROM has debugging on, so it is slower
and I don't know if SOC+ works at all without that microcode. You can put
the microcode in yourself if you extract it from Solaris drivers, there is a
simple define in the driver which tells you whether it is provided or not.
Second issue is that I could not get scatter-gather to work (the SOC+ manual
speaks about it briefly, but does not go into details and all my attempts
(there were just a few due to limited time to play with A5000) failed).
In fact, Solaris driver (at least the SOC) does not use scatter-gather
either, but due to different properties of Solaris buffer cache it is not
that big issue (average contiguous buffer in Solaris is much larger than in
Linux).
Cheers,
Jakub
___________________________________________________________________
Jakub Jelinek | [EMAIL PROTECTED] | http://sunsite.mff.cuni.cz
Administrator of SunSITE Czech Republic, MFF, Charles University
___________________________________________________________________
UltraLinux | http://ultra.linux.cz/ | http://ultra.penguin.cz/
Linux version 2.2.3 on a sparc64 machine (3958.37 BogoMips)
___________________________________________________________________
