| This driver supports the Qlogic FASXXX family of chips. This driver | |
| only works with the ISA, VLB, and PCMCIA versions of the Qlogic | |
| FastSCSI! cards as well as any other card based on the FASXX chip | |
| (including the Control Concepts SCSI/IDE/SIO/PIO/FDC cards). | |
| This driver does NOT support the PCI version. Support for these PCI | |
| Qlogic boards: | |
| * IQ-PCI | |
| * IQ-PCI-10 | |
| * IQ-PCI-D | |
| is provided by the qla1280 driver. | |
| Nor does it support the PCI-Basic, which is supported by the | |
| 'am53c974' driver. | |
| PCMCIA SUPPORT | |
| This currently only works if the card is enabled first from DOS. This | |
| means you will have to load your socket and card services, and | |
| QL41DOS.SYS and QL40ENBL.SYS. These are a minimum, but loading the | |
| rest of the modules won't interfere with the operation. The next | |
| thing to do is load the kernel without resetting the hardware, which | |
| can be a simple ctrl-alt-delete with a boot floppy, or by using | |
| loadlin with the kernel image accessible from DOS. If you are using | |
| the Linux PCMCIA driver, you will have to adjust it or otherwise stop | |
| it from configuring the card. | |
| I am working with the PCMCIA group to make it more flexible, but that | |
| may take a while. | |
| ALL CARDS | |
| The top of the qlogic.c file has a number of defines that controls | |
| configuration. As shipped, it provides a balance between speed and | |
| function. If there are any problems, try setting SLOW_CABLE to 1, and | |
| then try changing USE_IRQ and TURBO_PDMA to zero. If you are familiar | |
| with SCSI, there are other settings which can tune the bus. | |
| It may be a good idea to enable RESET_AT_START, especially if the | |
| devices may not have been just powered up, or if you are restarting | |
| after a crash, since they may be busy trying to complete the last | |
| command or something. It comes up faster if this is set to zero, and | |
| if you have reliable hardware and connections it may be more useful to | |
| not reset things. | |
| SOME TROUBLESHOOTING TIPS | |
| Make sure it works properly under DOS. You should also do an initial FDISK | |
| on a new drive if you want partitions. | |
| Don't enable all the speedups first. If anything is wrong, they will make | |
| any problem worse. | |
| IMPORTANT | |
| The best way to test if your cables, termination, etc. are good is to | |
| copy a very big file (e.g. a doublespace container file, or a very | |
| large executable or archive). It should be at least 5 megabytes, but | |
| you can do multiple tests on smaller files. Then do a COMP to verify | |
| that the file copied properly. (Turn off all caching when doing these | |
| tests, otherwise you will test your RAM and not the files). Then do | |
| 10 COMPs, comparing the same file on the SCSI hard drive, i.e. "COMP | |
| realbig.doc realbig.doc". Then do it after the computer gets warm. | |
| I noticed my system which seems to work 100% would fail this test if | |
| the computer was left on for a few hours. It was worse with longer | |
| cables, and more devices on the SCSI bus. What seems to happen is | |
| that it gets a false ACK causing an extra byte to be inserted into the | |
| stream (and this is not detected). This can be caused by bad | |
| termination (the ACK can be reflected), or by noise when the chips | |
| work less well because of the heat, or when cables get too long for | |
| the speed. | |
| Remember, if it doesn't work under DOS, it probably won't work under | |
| Linux. |