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> I believe Drew offered to handle the linux scsi driver for the NCR53cf94
> (very nice chip from what I hear) chip if we decided to use it. I'm not
> sure this offer still stands.
Someone wrote that the Emulex FAS216 is compatible with the NCR 53cf94.
Could be. Emulex makes clones of a few of the low-midrange NCR chips,
as well as their own high-end SCSI chips.
Unfortunately, when I asked for people to commit firmly to using one of the
chips in the NCR53c90 family, I saw only one response and nothing out of
Waldorf.
With no consensus, I wasn't about to waste my time on a driver that
wouldn't be used.
I made the offer when I still had plenty of free time - enough time
to wire wrap a prototype board, write the driver, and debug it,
and wasn't working on any other interesting projects.
Now, I'm working full time as a programmer, if I wasn't I'd still have
enough consulting to keep me busy, I'm in the middle of snowboarding
season (12" of fresh powder on Loveland Pass!), and am working on the
NCR53c800/700 series driver under Linux.
The marketoids bill the NCR53c810 as having an onboard "2 MIPS processor",
it's busmastering, runs code out of main memory, takes about 600ns to start
a SCSI command, has no limit on the number of discontiguous scatter/gather
buffers, and can do just about everything without host processor intervention.
And writing a SCSI driver that runs mostly on the SCSI chip, with a
scheduler to handle multiple threads of execution (one per command),
is much more fun than writing a SCSI driver for a simple chip that
has nothing more than a simple onboard sequencer :-)
Not to mention the fact that hardware was provided for the NCR53c810
driver, meaning a hot 486 PCI board (Real nice. 0ws cache, interleaved
main memory so writes alternate between 0 and 1 wait states, allegedly
transfers from main memory to PCI video boards at > 30M/sec) :-)
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