[ILUG] HighPoint 370 Linux Drivers

[Niall O Broin]

On Mon, Nov 19, 2001 at 12:24:34PM +0000, Stephane Dudzinski wrote:

> First time i notice that but promise ultra controllers (ata 100 aka hpt
> 370) are supported under linux by promise themselves, check out this

But is it really by Promise themselves - in /usr/src/linux/drivers/ide/hpt366.c you
can see an interesting line 

 * Note that final HPT370 support was done by force extraction of GPL
 
I bought one of these controllers quite some time ago and I was intrigued by
this line so I asked Andre Hedrick what it meant. Basically, Highpoint had
taken his code for earlier Highpoint chipsets, modified as necessary to
support the HPT370 and then were releasing the driver either as their own
work or in a binary only mode. It took apparently quite some effort (hence
"force extraction") to get Highpoint to adhere to the terms of the GPL.

I've just downloaded the SuSE package out of curiosity and lo and behold -
binary drivers only. Strings on the kernel module reveals a claim of
"author=HighPoint Technologies, Inc.". I wonder how true that is ? This is
definitely quite a different driver from the standard kernel version - it
supports RAID 0 & 1 - but as this hardware RAID is anyway not really
hardware RAID I wonder what advantages there are over simply using Linux
software RAID ?



Niall