Re: <rant> Vendors and kernel driver source that will not compile with Debian </rant>

[Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de>]

> >Anyway, The MegaRAID ATA133 I saw was software raid only and the actual
> >controllers could be used with the kernel piix driver.
> 
> Yes, it is a software RAID device driver, utility, etc... Yes it comes up as a
> standard IDE controller but it does not see the mirror configured by the BIOS
> on the controller w/o the LSI driver, thus only writes to one of the two
> physical drives.
> 
> Why mirror at the higher level if the mass storage controller driver can do the
> work and make the file system drivers think they are talking to a simple disk
> drive?

Because the higher-level implementation is faster, better debugged and
works across different controllers.  And it's also available in source
form (the three first arguments are a consequence of that actually).

If you want crappy drivers and vendor-locking you should be using
Windows or Solaris.