On 22 Jul 1999, Marc SCHAEFER wrote:
> Matthias Andree <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> > drives with that. So, what are your objections to the DC-390 and what
> > are your recommendations in favor of the SYM53C810A based upon?
>
> Infact, my summary has been done layer by layer, and until recently,
> I didn't know about the SuSE driver. Moreover, I have used
>
> Tekram DC-390F (875 based)
> Tekram U2W (895 based)
> NCR810 based boards
>
> but not the 390.
As it has been quoted, the 390 has a nice BIOS/SETUP, but its PCI/SCSI
part is poor compared to the SYM53C810(A).
When you purchase either a 390 or a 310 you just get what you pay for.
> > All Tekram boards are Tekram-designed AFAIK, just that these 395 series
> > happen to use a Tekram ASIC instead of Symbios (now LSI) or AMD chips.
>
> Yes, well, if you look at the board, you don't see much except the
> Symbios Logic chip. Thus my comment.
>
> > Tekram has promised with their very first product announcement that
> > Linux drivers had been in development, so "no Linux support" is a wrong
> > claim.
>
> This is from people in comp.periph.scsi saying either no driver,
> bad driver, or late driver.
If I refer to available driver sources from Tekram, their drivers for the
SYM53C8XX are a lot sub-optimal. They look like some driver for the AMD???
chip (390) hacked for it to work with SYM53C8XX series. Just hoping that
their drivers for commercial O/Ses are not made of the same recipe.
> Also the tcsim (?) driver was not updated for a long time before
> SuSE took over (for the 390). The drivers for the 875 were done by
> Gerard Roudier from a BSD port, no support for Tekram on this (but,
> according to the author, very good support from Symbios Logic. I
> also agree since I recently requested the manuals and I got all
> of them in less than 2 weeks, with source code disquette, for free,
> and without NDA).
That is the only serious way to support free software, in my opinion.
Signing a NDA in order to get documentation is a bad thing for Free
Software and indeed we should _always_ refuse to sign such a
'torche-cul':) (as French people designated some sort of paper we
utilize every day).
I also received some other _needed_ documents from SYMBIOS and they never
asked me for signing anything, but just asked me not to make them
available in their integrality to usenet. Such a recommendation is
understandable and has been understood.
By the way, the full data manuals for the 53C875 and 53C896 (at least),
are _freely_ downloadable from the LSILOGIC Web site (Technical library),
without any registration being required.
Can somebody let me know how I can get data manuals from Adaptec?
I am really interested in having such.
Regards,
G�rard.
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