ciss(4)

NAME

ciss - Common Interface for SCSI-3 Support driver

SYNOPSIS

device scbus
device ciss

DESCRIPTION

The ciss driver claims to provide a common interface between

generic SCSI
transports and intelligent host adapters.

The ciss driver supports CISS as defined in the document en

titled CISS
Command Interface for SCSI-3 Support Open Specification,

Version 1.04,
Valence Number 1, dated 2000/11/27, produced by Compaq Com

puter 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. En

try 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 reason

able 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 only supports the ``simple'' transport layer

over PCI.
This interface (ab)uses the I2O register set (specifically

the post
queues) to exchange commands with the adapter. Other inter

faces are
available, but we are not supposed to know about them, and

it is dubious
whether they would provide major performance improvements

except under
extreme load.

Non-disk devices (such as internal DATs and devices attached

to the
external SCSI bus) are supported as normal CAM devices pro

vided 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 but a bus

rescan might
be necessary.

HARDWARE

Controllers supported by the ciss driver include:

+o Compaq Smart Array 5300
+o Compaq Smart Array 532
+o Compaq Smart Array 5i
+o HP Smart Array 5312
+o HP Smart Array 6i
+o HP Smart Array 641
+o HP Smart Array 642
+o HP Smart Array 6400
+o HP Smart Array 6400 EM
+o HP Smart Array E400
+o HP Smart Array P600
+o HP Smart Array P800
+o HP Modular Smart Array 20 (MSA20)
+o HP Modular Smart Array 500 (MSA500)

SEE ALSO

cam(4), pass(4), xpt(4), loader.conf(5), camcontrol(8)

CISS Command Interface for SCSI-3 Support Open

Specification, Version
1.04, Valence Number 1, Compaq Computer Corporation,

2000/11/27.

AUTHORS

The ciss driver was written by Mike Smith <msmith@FreeB

SD.org>.

This manual page is based on his comments and was written by

Tom Rhodes
<trhodes@FreeBSD.org>.

BSD November 3, 2005

BSD