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Re: Problem using "scsi add-single-device" >/proc/scsi/scsi

daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Gerard Roudier)
Sat Jul 24 09:58:19 1999

Date:   Sat, 24 Jul 1999 16:10:03 +0200 (MET DST)
From: Gerard Roudier <groudier@club-internet.fr>
To: Robin Miller uhs <rmiller@zk3.dec.com>
cc: lancer@airways.com, linux-scsi@vger.rutgers.edu
In-Reply-To: <199907241334.JAA0000689114@anw.zk3.dec.com>



On Sat, 24 Jul 1999, Robin Miller uhs wrote:

> Hi Folks,
> 	Having been down this road of hot-swap issues, I have a couple
> comments here as well...
> 
> 	First off, while you may not wish to "formally" support hot-swap,
> the conditions which arise from unplugging a drive and/or powering a drive
> off, assuming proper termination is maintained, should be handled properly.
> That is, the SCSI bus should not be hung, and all outstanding I/O requests
> must be completed or rebooting the system is the only recovery action.

Indeed. Supporting Clause 10.3 of SPI-2 should be just fine even with 
LVD buses.

> 	I'd also like to mention that noticing a "Selection Timeout" is
> useful for certain applications.  For example, DEC's RAID controllers
> have a transparent controller failover feature using two controllers,
> so when one controller fails all I/O is automatically failed over to
> the other controller.  During this failover process, "Selection Timeouts"
> occur, and upper drivers use this to retry until the failover completes,
> usually with 10-12 seconds.

Indeed. An heuristic based on selection timeouts is just fine to detect
controller and/or device failures. 

> 	I'm used to a mature SCSI sub-system, implemented using CAM
> (Common Access Method).  As Linux matures, I think CAM-3's advanced
> architecture may be worth considering.  Please no flames!

Agreed. Modulo some minor clean-ups, CAM3 is probably the way to go.

Thanks for your posting.

> My 2 cents,

Change is about 10 centimes in France. :)

> Robin

[ End of flames. :-)) ]

Gérard.


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