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ciss_load="YES"

DESCRIPTION

The ciss driver supports CISS as defined in the document entitled CISS Command Interface for SCSI-3 Support Open Specification, Version 1.04, Valence Number 1, dated 2000/11/27, produced by Compaq Computer Corporation.

We provide a shim layer between the ciss interface and CAM(4), offloading most of the queueing and being-a-disk chores onto CAM. Entry to the driver is via the PCI bus attachment ciss_probe(), ciss_attach(), etc. and via the CAM interface ciss_cam_action(), and ciss_cam_poll(). The Compaq ciss adapters require faked responses to get reasonable behavior out of them. In addition, the ciss command set is by no means adequate to support the functionality of a RAID controller, and thus the supported Compaq adapters utilize portions of the control protocol from earlier Compaq adapter families.

Currently ciss supports the “simple” and “performant” transport layer.

Non-disk devices (such as internal DATs and devices attached to the external SCSI bus) are supported as normal CAM devices provided that they are exported by the controller firmware and are not marked as being masked. Masked devices can be exposed by setting the hw.ciss.expose_hidden_physical tunable to non-zero at boot time. Direct Access devices (such as disk drives) are only exposed as pass(4) devices. Hot-insertion and removal of devices is supported and notification messages will be reported to the console and logs.

The problem which adapter freezes with the message “ADAPTER HEARTBEAT FAILED” might be solved by updating the firmware and/or setting the hw.ciss.nop_message_heartbeat tunable to non-zero at boot time.