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RFC: should we deprecate unmaintained isa-only drivers?

DISCUSSION Christoph Hellwig 2 participants 8 messages Dec 30, 2014 – Sep 11, 2016 SCSI

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#0 lore raw

We've got a few very old, isa-only SCSI HBA drivers in the tree. Of those only one (aha152x) sas significant maintaince since the dawn of git, all others only saw global / automatic updates. 4 of those are fairly trivial wrappers aroudn the NCR538 core, so I don't mind keeping them:

- dtc
- g_NCR5380
- pas16
- t128

but I'd love to know if anyone is actually using the other drivers:

- wd7000
- aha1542
- in2000
- NCR53c406
- sym53c416
- u14-34f
- ultrastor

note that the last two even drive the same hardware. There is significant cruft in all these, so dropping them would help further maintainance of the SCSI midlayer.

#1 lore raw
Quoted 21 lines · On Tuesday 30 December 2014 17:06:16 Christoph Hellwig wrote:

We've got a few very old, isa-only SCSI HBA drivers in the tree. Of those only one (aha152x) sas significant maintaince since the dawn of git, all others only saw global / automatic updates. 4 of those are fairly trivial wrappers aroudn the NCR538 core, so I don't mind keeping them:

- dtc
- g_NCR5380
- pas16
- t128

but I'd love to know if anyone is actually using the other drivers:

- wd7000
- aha1542
- in2000
- NCR53c406
- sym53c416
- u14-34f
- ultrastor

Quoted 3 lines

note that the last two even drive the same hardware. There is significant cruft in all these, so dropping them would help further maintainance of the SCSI midlayer.

I think I have a AHA-1542B ISA card so I can fix the aha1542 driver.

Signature · 1 line
Ondrej Zary
#2 lore raw
Quoted 5 lines · Ondrej Zary
Quoted 3 lines

note that the last two even drive the same hardware. There is significant cruft in all these, so dropping them would help further maintainance of the SCSI midlayer.

I think I have a AHA-1542B ISA card so I can fix the aha1542 driver.

Can you simply test that it even works for now? If that's the case add yourself to MAINTAINERS for it, and and convert it away from using scsi_module.c as a start so that we get rid of the 10 year deprecated old-style host registration.

#3 lore raw
Quoted 11 lines · On Wednesday 07 January 2015 15:34:32 Christoph Hellwig wrote:
Quoted 5 lines · Ondrej Zary
Quoted 3 lines

note that the last two even drive the same hardware. There is significant cruft in all these, so dropping them would help further maintainance of the SCSI midlayer.

I think I have a AHA-1542B ISA card so I can fix the aha1542 driver.

Can you simply test that it even works for now? If that's the case add yourself to MAINTAINERS for it, and and convert it away from using scsi_module.c as a start so that we get rid of the 10 year deprecated old-style host registration.

Yes, it still works in 3.19-rc3:

[  691.940019] Configuring Adaptec (SCSI-ID 7) at IO:330, IRQ 11, DMA priority 7
[  691.942063] scsi host2: Adaptec 1542
[  691.943474] bounce: isa pool size: 16 pages
[  691.956495] scsi 2:0:0:0: Direct-Access     IBM      DORS-32160       WA0A PQ: 0 ANSI: 2
[  693.540016] sd 2:0:0:0: [sdb] 4226725 512-byte logical blocks: (2.16 GB/2.01 GiB)
[  693.571820] sd 2:0:0:0: [sdb] Write Protect is off
[  693.571911] sd 2:0:0:0: [sdb] Mode Sense: b3 00 00 08
[  693.587551] sd 0:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg0 type 0
[  693.590061] sd 2:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg1 type 0
[  693.593491] sd 2:0:0:0: [sdb] Write cache: enabled, read cache: enabled, doesn't support DPO or FUA
[  693.721206]  sdb: sdb1
[  693.856355] sd 2:0:0:0: [sdb] Attached SCSI disk
Signature · 1 line
Ondrej Zary
#4 lore raw
In reply to Christoph Hellwig
Quoted 13 lines · On Tuesday 30 December 2014 17:06:16 Christoph Hellwig wrote:

We've got a few very old, isa-only SCSI HBA drivers in the tree. Of those only one (aha152x) sas significant maintaince since the dawn of git, all others only saw global / automatic updates. 4 of those are fairly trivial wrappers aroudn the NCR538 core, so I don't mind keeping them:

- dtc
- g_NCR5380
- pas16
- t128

but I'd love to know if anyone is actually using the other drivers:

Quoted 7 lines

- wd7000
- aha1542
- in2000
- NCR53c406
- sym53c416
- u14-34f
- ultrastor

NCR53c406a and sym53c416 look very similar. The register numbers and commands are almost the same so NCR53c406 support could probably be added to sym53c416 driver (looks better of the two) and NCR53c406a driver removed. Now I have cards with both chips so I'll try.

Signature · 1 line
Ondrej Zary
#5 lore raw
Quoted 4 lines · Ondrej Zary

NCR53c406a and sym53c416 look very similar. The register numbers and commands are almost the same so NCR53c406 support could probably be added to sym53c416 driver (looks better of the two) and NCR53c406a driver removed. Now I have cards with both chips so I'll try.

Cool, I'd love to see one high quality driver to handle the workload of both the old ones!

Quoted 3 lines
Signature · 2 lines
-- 
Ondrej Zary

---end quoted text---

#6 lore raw
In reply to Ondrej Zary
Quoted 8 lines · Ondrej Zary
Quoted 7 lines

- wd7000
- aha1542
- in2000
- NCR53c406
- sym53c416
- u14-34f
- ultrastor

Quoted 4 lines

NCR53c406a and sym53c416 look very similar. The register numbers and commands are almost the same so NCR53c406 support could probably be added to sym53c416 driver (looks better of the two) and NCR53c406a driver removed. Now I have cards with both chips so I'll try.

Did you get a chance to look at this project?

#7 lore raw
Quoted 9 lines · On Sunday 11 September 2016 19:01:55 Christoph Hellwig wrote:
Quoted 8 lines · Ondrej Zary
Quoted 7 lines

- wd7000
- aha1542
- in2000
- NCR53c406
- sym53c416
- u14-34f
- ultrastor

Quoted 6 lines
Quoted 4 lines

NCR53c406a and sym53c416 look very similar. The register numbers and commands are almost the same so NCR53c406 support could probably be added to sym53c416 driver (looks better of the two) and NCR53c406a driver removed. Now I have cards with both chips so I'll try.

Did you get a chance to look at this project?

At first try (with some quick hacking only), the 53c406 card didn't work with sym53c416 driver. I haven't had time for more serious work back then. Hopefully I'll try harder soon.

Signature · 1 line
Ondrej Zary