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               Mylex DAC960 PCI RAID Controller Driver for Linux

                        Version 2.0.0 for Linux 2.0.36
                        Version 2.1.0 for Linux 2.1.130

                              BETA TEST RELEASE 3

                               23 November 1998

                               Leonard N. Zubkoff
                               Dandelion Digital
                               lnz@dandelion.com

           Copyright 1998 by Leonard N. Zubkoff <lnz@dandelion.com>


                                 INTRODUCTION

Mylex, Inc. designs and manufactures a variety of high performance PCI RAID
controllers based on the Intel i960 processor.  Mylex Corporation is located at
34551 Ardenwood Blvd., Fremont, California 94555, USA and can be reached at
510/796-6100 or on the World Wide Web at http://www.mylex.com.  Mylex RAID
Technical Support can be reached by electronic mail at support@mylex.com, by
Voice at 510/608-2400, or by FAX at 510/745-7715.  Contact information for
offices in Europe and Japan is available on the Web site.

The latest information on Linux support for DAC960 PCI RAID Controllers, as
well as the most recent release of this driver, will always be available from
my Linux Home Page at URL "http://www.dandelion.com/Linux/".

Bug reports should be sent via electronic mail to "lnz@dandelion.com".  Please
include with the bug report the complete configuration messages reported by the
driver at startup, along with any subsequent system messages relevant to the
controller's operation, and a detailed description of your system's hardware
configuration.

Please consult the DAC960 documentation for detailed information regarding
installation and configuration of the controllers.  This document primarily
provides information specific to the Linux DAC960 support.


                                DRIVER FEATURES

The DAC960 is supported solely as a high performance RAID controller, not as an
interface to arbitrary SCSI devices.  The Linux DAC960 driver operates at the
block device level, the same level as the SCSI and IDE drivers.  Unlike other
RAID controllers currently supported on Linux, the DAC960 driver is not
dependent on the SCSI subsystem, and hence avoids all the complexity and
unnecessary code that would be associated with an implementation as a SCSI
driver.  The DAC960 driver is designed for as high a performance as possible
with no compromises or extra code for compatibility with lower performance
devices.

The DAC960 driver is architected to support up to 8 controllers per system.
Each DAC960 controller can support up to 45 disk drives on 3 channels.  The
drives installed on a controller are divided into one or more "Drive Groups",
and then each Drive Group is subdivided further into 1 to 32 "Logical Drives".
Each Logical Drive has a specific RAID Level and caching policy associated with
it, and it appears to Linux as a single block device.  Logical Drives are
further subdivided into up to 7 partitions through the normal Linux and PC disk
partitioning schemes.  Logical Drives are also known as "System Drives", and
Drive Groups are also called "Packs".  Both terms are in use in the Mylex
documentation; I have chosen to standardize on the more generic "Logical Drive"
and "Drive Group".

DAC960 RAID disk devices are named in the style of the Device File System
(DEVFS).  The device corresponding to Logical Drive D on Controller C is
referred to as /dev/rd/cCdD, and the partitions are called /dev/rd/cCdDp1
through /dev/rd/cCdDp7.  For example, partition 3 of Logical Drive 5 on
Controller 2 is referred to as /dev/rd/c2d5p3.  Note that unlike with SCSI
disks the device names will not change in the event of a disk drive failure.
The DAC960 driver is assigned major numbers 48 - 55 with one major number per
controller.  The 8 bits of minor number are divided into 5 bits for the Logical
Drive and 3 bits for the partition.


                     SUPPORTED DAC960 PCI RAID CONTROLLERS

The following list comprises the supported DAC960 PCI RAID Controllers as of
the date of this document.  It is recommended that anyone purchasing a Mylex
PCI RAID Controller not in the following table contact the author beforehand to
verify that it is or will be supported.

AcceleRAID 250 (DAC960PTL-1)
            Uses onboard Symbios SCSI chips on certain motherboards
            Also includes one onboard Wide Ultra-2/LVD SCSI channel
            66MHz Intel i960RD RISC Processor
            4MB/8MB/16MB/32MB/64MB/128MB ECC EDO Memory

AcceleRAID 200 (DAC960PTL-0)
            Uses onboard Symbios SCSI chips on certain motherboards
            Includes no onboard SCSI channels
            66MHz Intel i960RD RISC Processor
            4MB/8MB/16MB/32MB/64MB/128MB ECC EDO Memory

DAC960PJ    1/2/3 Wide Ultra SCSI-3 Channels
            66MHz Intel i960RD RISC Processor
            4MB/8MB/16MB/32MB/64MB/128MB ECC EDO Memory

DAC960PG    1/2/3 Wide Ultra SCSI-3 Channels
            33MHz Intel i960RP RISC Processor
            4MB/8MB ECC EDO Memory

DAC960PU    1/2/3 Wide Ultra SCSI-3 Channels
            Intel i960CF RISC Processor
            2MB/4MB/8MB/16MB/32MB EDRAM or DRAM Memory (max 8MB EDRAM)

DAC960PD    1/2/3 Wide Fast SCSI-2 Channels
            Intel i960CF RISC Processor
            2MB/4MB/8MB/16MB/32MB EDRAM or DRAM Memory (max 8MB EDRAM)

DAC960PL    1/2/3 Wide Fast SCSI-2 Channels
            Intel i960 RISC Processor
            2MB/4MB/8MB/16MB/32MB DRAM Memory

For the DAC960PJ and DAC960PG, firmware version 4.06-0-00 or above is required.
This firmware version is available from http://www.dandelion.com/Linux/ and
will eventually be available from http://www.mylex.com as well.  It has been
released by Mylex and is provided with new controllers, but it has not yet
appeared on their support web pages as of the date of this document.

For the DAC960PU, DAC960PD, and DAC960PL, firmware version 3.51-0-04 or above
required.  This firmware version is available from http://www.mylex.com.

Note that earlier revisions of the DAC960PU, DAC960PD, and DAC960PL controllers
were delivered with version 2.xx firmware.  Version 2.xx firmware is not
supported by this driver and no support is envisioned.  Contact Mylex RAID
Technical Support to inquire about upgrading controllers with version 2.xx
firmware to version 3.51-0-04.  Upgrading to version 3.xx firmware requires
installation of higher capacity Flash ROM chips, and not all DAC960PD and
DAC960PL controllers can be upgraded.

Please note that not all SCSI disk drives are suitable for use with DAC960
controllers, and only particular firmware versions of any given model may
actually function correctly.  Similarly, not all motherboards have a BIOS that
properly initializes the AcceleRAID 250, AcceleRAID 200, DAC960PJ, and DAC960PG
because the Intel i960RD/RP is a multi-function device.  If in doubt, contact
Mylex RAID Technical Support (support@mylex.com) to verify compatibility.


                CONTROLLER CONFIGURATION AND STATUS MONITORING

The DAC960 Online Configuration Utilities are not yet available on Linux but
will hopefully be supported in the future.  The AcceleRAID 250, AcceleRAID 200,
DAC960PJ, and DAC960PG controllers can generally be configured using the DAC960
Configuration Utility included in the controller's BIOS ROM and available via
Alt-R during BIOS initialization.  Older DAC960 controllers required the DACCF
utility that runs from a DOS boot disk.

The status of each DAC960 controller is queried every 7 seconds by the Linux
driver to verify that no problems have been detected, and any changes in status
are reported through appropriate kernel messages.  The following log excerpt
details the process of the controller automatically rebuilding onto a spare
drive when a disk drive failed.  In this example, 4 drives in a SAF-TE
enclosure were grouped into a Drive Group which was then divided into 3 Logical
Drives configured as RAID-5, RAID-5, and RAID-6.  An additional identical drive
was installed as a "Standby" or "Hot Spare" to provide for automatic
rebuilding.  The first two messages are the result of the standby drive being
removed, the third message is a result of it being reinstalled, and the
remaining messages are the result of the first drive being removed to force an
automatic rebuild.

DAC960#0: Physical Drive 0:4 killed because it was removed 
DAC960#0: Physical Drive 0:4 is now DEAD 
DAC960#0: Physical Drive 0:4 is now STANDBY 
DAC960#0: Logical Drive 0 (/dev/rd/c0d0) is now CRITICAL
DAC960#0: Logical Drive 1 (/dev/rd/c0d1) is now CRITICAL
DAC960#0: Logical Drive 2 (/dev/rd/c0d2) is now CRITICAL
DAC960#0: Physical Drive 0:0 killed because of timeout on SCSI command 
DAC960#0: Physical Drive 0:0 is now DEAD 
DAC960#0: Physical Drive 0:0 killed because it was removed 
DAC960#0: Physical Drive 0:4 is now WRITE-ONLY 
DAC960#0: REBUILD IN PROGRESS: Logical Drive 0 (/dev/rd/c0d0) 9% completed
DAC960#0: REBUILD IN PROGRESS: Logical Drive 0 (/dev/rd/c0d0) 45% completed
DAC960#0: REBUILD IN PROGRESS: Logical Drive 0 (/dev/rd/c0d0) 90% completed
DAC960#0: REBUILD IN PROGRESS: Logical Drive 1 (/dev/rd/c0d1) 28% completed
DAC960#0: REBUILD IN PROGRESS: Logical Drive 1 (/dev/rd/c0d1) 66% completed
DAC960#0: REBUILD IN PROGRESS: Logical Drive 2 (/dev/rd/c0d2) 62% completed
DAC960#0: REBUILD IN PROGRESS: Logical Drive 2 (/dev/rd/c0d2) 82% completed
DAC960#0: REBUILD COMPLETED SUCCESSFULLY
DAC960#0: Logical Drive 0 (/dev/rd/c0d0) is now ONLINE
DAC960#0: Logical Drive 1 (/dev/rd/c0d1) is now ONLINE
DAC960#0: Logical Drive 2 (/dev/rd/c0d2) is now ONLINE 
DAC960#0: Physical Drive 0:4 is now ONLINE 


                              DRIVER INSTALLATION

This distribution was prepared for Linux kernel version 2.0.36 or 2.1.130.

To install the DAC960 RAID driver, you may use the following commands,
replacing "/usr/src" with wherever you keep your Linux kernel source tree:

  cd /usr/src
  tar -xvzf DAC960-2.0.0-Beta3.tar.gz (or DAC960-2.1.0-Beta3.tar.gz)
  mv README.DAC960 DAC960.[ch] linux/drivers/block
  patch -p0 < DAC960.patch
  cd linux
  make config
  make depend
  make zImage (or bzImage)

Then install "arch/i386/boot/zImage" or "arch/i386/boot/bzImage" as your
standard kernel, run lilo if appropriate, and reboot.

To create the necessary devices in /dev, the "make_rd" script included in
"DAC960-Utilities.tar.gz" from http://www.dandelion.com/Linux/ may be used.
Also included in this archive are patches to LILO 20 and FDISK v2.8 that add
DAC960 support, along with statically linked executables of LILO and FDISK.
This modified version of LILO will allow booting from a DAC960 controller
and/or mounting the root file system from a DAC960.  Unfortunately, installing
directly onto a DAC960 will be problematic until the various Linux distribution
vendors update their installation utilities.


                      DAC960 ANNOUNCEMENTS MAILING LIST

The DAC960 Announcements Mailing List provides a forum for informing Linux
users of new driver releases and other announcements regarding Linux support
for DAC960 PCI RAID Controllers.  To join the mailing list, send a message to
"dac960-announce-request@dandelion.com" with the line "subscribe" in the
message body.