On Friday 25 August 2006 01:52, Nikolas Britton wrote:

<shrugs> cvs log ata-chipset.c..

---------------------------- revision 1.21 date: 2003/05/01 06:20:50; author: sos; state: Exp; lines: +144 -7 I'm pleased to announce that Promise is now supporting the FreeBSD project by providing documentation (under NDA) and hardware for testing. This commit is the first result of the cooperation, and adds support for several of their new controllers that we didn't support before (and probably newer would have without this arrangement).

Add support for the Promise SATA150 TX2/TX4 and the Promise TX4000 controllers. This also adds support for various motherboard fitted Promise SATA/ATA chips. Note that this code uses memory mapped registers to minimize overhead. I belive FreeBSD has made another first in the Open Source world by being able to release support for this :)

----------------------------

I don't ever download drivers from a companies website for FreeBSD so I couldn't care less if they're mentioned on it :)

Erm, I think "paranoid conspiracy theory" covers this.

Just because they use the same chip doesn't mean the driver will magically work.. The CPU on the RAID card runs a program and that program is what defines the interface with the OS.

ISTR 3ware cards have XScale's on them too.. Perhaps Areca cloned them! </sarcasm>

Promise cards have been supported for much longer than Areca (longer than Areca has actually existed as a company?) and it is my understanding they regularly supply Soren with documentation and hardware.