ATAng Driver Preview for FreeBSD

Dan writes "Soeren Schmidt announces the availability of the first preview release of ATAng drivers for FreeBSD. Before these rather radical changes to the ATA driver hits the tree, here is the opportunity to test them out, give useful feedback and for the depending subsytems to adjust to the new ways of things (burncd & atapicam are good examples). These drivers provide the framework for supporting new ATA controllers that have facilities for chaining commands and HW XOR's etc. These changes also facilitate merge of ATA and ATAPI code, as well make full use of fx Promise's new chips."

Can someone...

[Anonymous Coward]

Please post an unbiased and informative opinion on the current state of FreeBSD? Some third-party surveys, like those by NetCraft, would be helpful.

Re:Can someone...

[trippinonbsd]

Does this [slashdot.org] help?

Re:Can someone...

[Anonymous Coward]

Try cvsweb.freebsd.org, [e-mail], and [e-mail].

it's alive!

[Anonymous Coward]

I use *BSD. After all, I was the one who resurrected it from the dead.

Sincerely,

Dr. Herbert "Herbie" Frankenstein

compaq laptops

[jcgf]

I'm using generic ata drivers with my laptop atm, it would be very cool if this sped up my performance at all.

Heh

[NanoGator]

"ATAng" -- Finally, Slashdot visitors get direct access to... oh forget it, too easy.

Sveet

[craig2787]

This is good, one thing off the TODO list! Thats assuming its good, which I'm sure it is; I've never had problems with the ATA driver (only the devices themselves). In fact, I bought a broken (!) disk off of ebay, and freebsd detected that it sucked, and "removed it from config." The box kept humming along like nothing happened. It was sveet.

Re:Sveet (more action)

[craig2787]

Let me elaborate: I newfs'ed the disk, started copying data to it, and it started failing. FreeBSD umounted it and the whole nine yards. cp exited; otherwise nothing `bad' happened. As mentioned, it was sveet.

Re:Sveet (more action)

[Istealmymusic]

That's pretty sweet. But if I were you, I'd try partitioning around the bad sectors.

Not to be biased....

[craig2787]

....but the articles in the BSD section are often far more interesting than the crap on the front page. They `matter' a lot more. Who cares what Bond would use for wireless hacking.

Re:Not to be biased....

[captaink]

amen!

Works great, give it a try

[Anonymous Coward]

This driver worked great for me - performance was incredible on my laptop. I loaded up the disk as much as I could and everything still ran smooth as silk. Give it a try, contribute to FreeBSD's legendary stability. :)

RAID

[rf0]

Highlight here is that I will be finally able to use the RAID controllers on my MB's rather than using just vinum

Woo

Rus

Re:RAID

[Beetjebrak]

Most mainboard RAID controllers offload their work to the CPU anyway, which offers no performance gain over vinum. Vinum, however, is a lot more flexible than most onboard RAID controllers I've seen. It performs MUCH better than the FastTrack100 on my slightly aging Asus A7V266. I don't have the exact hard numbers ready to back this claim up, but I did benchmark it and it proved to be much faster. Vinum isn't a bad system at all, and most fileservers are overpowered in the CPU department anyway. An Athlon X

What I would like...

[atcurtis]

I would like it if the ATA/ATAPI driver was implemented to use CAM...

The big advantage of that would be all disk storage is accessed through da0... etc.

I just think it would be much tidier...