Adaptec 7770 Family Manager for NetWare 4.xx ============================================ ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Driver Name: AIC7770.DSK Supported Host Adapters: AHA-274xA, AHA-274xAT, AHA-274xW, AHA-284xA, AIC-7770 chip ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- This subdirectory contains Adaptec's NetWare v4.xx SCSI disk modules and Advanced SCSI Programming Interface (ASPI) managers. ALL of Adaptec's NetWare 386 drivers have full support for standard SCSI disk drives, "NetWare Ready" drives, and removable media disk drives (including optical drives). The driver also contains a built-in ASPI manager. This allows for other NetWare Loadable Modules (NLMs) to gain access to the host adapter. Given the flexibility of ASPI, several companies are currently providing server-based tape backup solutions through ASPI. SBackup is a server based tape backup solution which is shipped by Novell starting with NetWare 3.11. SBackup supports the ASPI interface. There are other ASPI modules already developed or under development. A programming specification is available from Adaptec if you are interested in writing your own NetWare 386 ASPI module. To load the driver: :load [path] aic7770 [options] AIC7770.DSK has been modified to support a new SCB swapping scheme. This improves performance of the SCSI subsystem, particularly with configurations that include multiple hard disk drives. The feature requires an enhanced version of the AIC-7770 chip architecture (rev. E or higher.) The driver, without this feature, still works on non-rev. E chips. If your file server does a lot of IO operations and you want to try opti- mizing its performance, you can adjust the "max_tags=?" and "max_nontags" command line switch. These switches control the maximum number of tagged and non-tagged commands outstanding at a given device, respectively. Refer to your disk-drive's documentation to determine if tagged-queuing is supported, and the maximum number of outstanding commands supported. Default values are 8 and 2, respectively. Examples of changing this feature are below: :load aic7770 max_tags=2 max_nontags=1 or :load aic7770 tag_disable=ffff max_nontags=1 The first example is set for tag-queuing drives and the second case is for non-tag-queuing drives. The max_tags parameter can be set as 2, 4, 6, 8, or 10. The max_non_tags parameter can be set as 1 or 2. Larger values give the drives more opportunity for optimization, but take up more memory in the server. In some instances, drives may not support the driver's maximum count, or may suffer starvation problems with large counts. Some systems may not work well with your host adapter configured to use interrupt 15. It's recommended that you use any available interrupt except 15 when using AIC7770.DSK with Novell NetWare 386. ***************************************************************************** The following table shows default values for driver command line options. Please refer to the User's Guide Netware chapter for more detailed descriptions. ============================================================================= OPTION DEFAULT VALUE RANGE ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- slot n/a 1-15 verbose n y,n removable on on,off fixed_disk on on,off dev_enable ffh 00-ffh (bitmask) tag_disable 00h 00-ffh (bitmask) flush_diskreq 00, see below 00-ffh (bitmask) io_combine 16 1-16 (decimal) max_sectors 128 1-128 (decimal) max_tags 8 1-32 (decimal) max_nontags 2 1-2 (decimal) read_after_write 1 0,1 (1=write and verify, 0=write only) instrumentation 0 0,1 (1=turn on performance instrumentation) multlun_targets see below 0-ffh (bitmask) lun_enable see below 01-ffh (bitmask) Note: All bitmasks except lun_enable are extended to 16 bits (ffffh) for the AHA-274xW (wide) boards. They are extended to 24 bits (ff00ffh) for AHA-274xT (twin) boards, with bits 16-23 referring to the secondary channel. Lun_enable refers to lun's 0-7, to be scanned on all targets. It is also extended to 24 bits for AHA-274xT (twin boards), with bits 16-23 referring to the secondary channel. Multiple LUN support was previously supported only through the lun_enable switch. The multlun_targets switch was added to avoid problems during scan with targets that do not handle multiple LUN's gracefully. It is a per-target mask, which specifies the targets on which 8 LUN's will be scanned. The two switches can be used separately or together: multlun_targets=C (Scan for 8 LUN's on devices 2 and 3.) lun_enable=F (Scan for LUN's 0-3 on all targets.) multlun_targets=3 lun_enable=7 (Scan for LUN's 0-2, but only on targets 0 and 1. Scan for LUN 0 only on all other targets.) If LUN 0 is not present for a given device, multiple LUN's are never scanned. Flush_diskreq specifies targets on which an ordered tag will be sent every 64 commands. This forces all outstanding commands to be completed before the ordered-tag command, avoiding starvation problems. A start_unit switch also exists for aspicd.dsk. The default is ffffh (all targets). It may need to be turned off to avoid SCSI bus hangs caused by multiple-LUN CD-ROM's. This switch will not effect non-CD devices. =============================================================================