[BBLISA] Why do Linux rescue CDs make SATA disks look like SCSI ?

[John Stoffel]

Dean> It happens with IDE disks under sparc linux in rescue mode. 

I've got a sparc linux box running Ubuntu 7.04 (hopeing to upgrade to
8.x without problems...) and this is strange news to me.  Can you give
me more details on your setup?  In general, this is more of a kernel
version and kernel drivers issue, than anything else.

Dean> I agree, its annoying.  I think the Linux kernel seems to be
Dean> going in the wrong direction...

Basically, the original IDE drivers would have needed *major* surgery
to work with the new SATA controllers and drives.  SATA supports a
large subset (possibly superset, my knowledge is hazt) of the core
SCSI commands and capabilities.  

The original IDE drivers and drives are descended from the dumb as
rocks MFM and RLL drives and controllers.  Vendors learned alot with
the IDE, EIDE, etc transitions and how painful they were.  And how
poorly those drives/controllers performmed.  This became even *more*
evident as Moore's Law showed how piss-poor those drives were, while
SCSI drives just ratcheted up the BUS speed, but didn't have to change
the commands, or logic all that much.

Anyway.  With the new SATA disks converging in abilities with SCSI,
they decided to re-use alot of the SCSI mid-layer stuff, since it made
sense to reuse code which was already working well and was well
tested.  

As I said, I've proably got some details wrong, but the core is
correct. 


Dean> I keep hoping OSF/1 will get opensourced like Motif and DCE.

I've got a pristine box of Plan9 manuals and source on my shelf.  Not
sure why... but wouldn't that be a better course than OSF/1?  Though I
admit advfs would be a nice thing to have, if only to compare it to
btrfs and ext4. 

Dean> I actually just spoke with TOG about it--said they'd ask the
Dean> lawyers, so keep fingers crossed.  But I'd probably also jump at
Dean> a distribution with GNU commands and libs based on OpenSolaris
Dean> kernel, but the CDDL doesn't quite allow repackaging...sigh.

Doesn't OpenSolaris have a mostly GNU tool chain nowdays?  Or can't
you at least layer it on easily, even if only as an addon?

John