Re: NCR53Cxxx drivers

Marc Mutz (Marc@Mutz.com)
Fri, 23 Jul 1999 23:05:23 +0200

Barrett G. Lyon wrote:
>
> At 04:43 PM 7/23/99 +0200, you wrote:
> >Barrett G. Lyon wrote:
> >>
> ><snip>
> >> The three drivers are:
> >>
> >> CONFIG_SCSI_NCR53C7xx generic driver
> >> CONFIG_SCSI_NCR53C8XX generic driver
> >> CONFIG_SCSI_NCR53C8XX_SYMBIOS_COMPAT symbios driver
> >>
> >Shouldn't no.3 be CONFIG_SCSI_SYM53C8XX instead?
>
> You would think? Thats why I wrote the email, because it felt as if
> something was not right.
>
>From my understanding of the help text to CONFIG_SCSI_SYM53C8XX the
ncr53c8xx driver (never used ncr53c7xx myself, so omitting comments to
that one) can drive mostly all boards with that chip, while the sym
driver can handle only newer boards from symbios logic, but uses new
features that the ncr driver cannot use.

I used ncr... first to drive my symbios logic USCSI board, then sym,
both w/o any problems.

CONFIG_SCSI_NCR53C8XX_SYMBIOS_COMPAT just tells the {ncr,sym}53c8xx
drivers to assume on boards w/o nvram that the IO lines wiring is
symbios compatible, so added functionality can be used.

To sum up:
- ncr53c{7,8}xx are fairly orthogonal to each other in that they support
different chipsets.
- {ncr,sym}53c8xx are not orthogonal, because the sym driver handles a
subset of chipset{s, revisions} the ncr handles, but supports advanced
features of that subset.
- CONFIG_SCSI_NCR53C8XX_SYMBIOS_COMPAT is just an opion to
{ncr,sym}53c8xx

Marc

-- 
Marc Mutz <Marc@Mutz.com>                    http://marc.mutz.com/
University of Bielefeld, Dep. of Mathematics / Dep. of Physics


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