Okay, this is partially political and partially technical. Linus, since
you're the final arbiter of these issues, your input is greatly
appreciated.
I'm working on integrating support for some USB Mass Storage devices.
Unfortunately, these devices are pretty much on the cutting edge, so they
use 16 byte commands.
One of the features of my driver is that I do an in-place manipulation of
SCSI commands as they fly by, to translate them so they will be properly
understood on the receiving end. For most devices, the 12 bytes allocated
for a SCSI command provides an adequate buffer (even for ATAPI devices).
However, for this device, a 16 byte buffer is necessary.
Normally, I'd just go allocating my own buffer for this... but it occurs to
me that there has been much talk of changing the MAX_COMMAND_SIZE from 12
to 16 to support SCSI-III devices. A quick grep of drivers/scsi shows that
MAX_COMMAND_SIZE is only used to allocate arrays and fill them with 0, so
it _looks_ like just changing the #define in scsi.h to 16 will work
_just_fine_ with no other code modifications.
The question is this: Could this actually happen for 2.4.2? We can solve
the technical problems, so the only thing to overcome is the "should we be
changing this in a 2.4.x kernel" question.
There's been discussion in the past, which boiled down to "we'll do it when
we need it". And it looks easily doable. And we need it.
Comments?
Matt
--
Matthew Dharm Home: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Maintainer, Linux USB Mass Storage Driver
P: How about "Web Designer"?
DP: I'd like a name that people won't laugh at.
-- Pitr and Dust Puppy
User Friendly, 12/6/1997
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