Hi everybody,
I'd like to announce an updated driver for the controllers based on the
Tekram TRM-S1040 chip. The controllolers from Tekram's DC15 and DC395 series
fall under this category.
There has been a driver out there (1.10/a/1.11) which was reported to cause
problems. It took me some time to debug it, and I added a high amount of
sanity checks and tracing code to the driver in order to find the bug.
Basically, if devices disconnected from the bus, the state of the chips
(FIFOs) were not cleaned up in every case, which caused data corruption for
some people. This one is solved now, as well as some other minor issues.
There is one issue left, which might or might not be a problem: The chip
reacts very sensitive on non-perfect SCSI busses. While the ncr53c8xx is
able to drive my SCSI bus (actively terminated, about 2.5m long, partially
wide) at full Fast-20 speed (20-MHz), the DC395x fails to do so, and 10MHz
is the maximum it does reliably. It locks up the bus in such a situation and
only recovers after a bus reset. (The exception handling being clever enough
to lower the speed in such a case in order to cure the problem.) With a much
shorter bus, I was able to use 20MHz. I inquired Tekram about this, so maybe
a few filter settings can improve the situation or at least the detection
and cleaning up of trouble without reset.
Also a lot of features has been added, such as the possibility to tune the
driver while running by using the /proc/scsi/dc395x_trm/? interface.
It is compatible with 2.3 kernels now. It still uses the old exception
handling scheme, but that will be changed with one of the next versions.
I would like everybody having such a controller to test the version 1.23 of
the driver and tell me whether there are problems. If you reported problems
to me before, please tell me, whether those are solved now.
Get it from
http://www.garloff.de/kurt/linux/dc395/
ftp://ftp.suse.com/pub/people/garloff/linux/dc395/
Regards,
--
Kurt Garloff <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Eindhoven, NL
GPG key: See mail header, key servers Linux kernel development
SuSE GmbH, Nuernberg, FRG SCSI, Security
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