[SeaBIOS] [Qemu-devel] XP install cores with SCSI LSI 53C895A disks

[Gerd Hoffmann]

  Hi,

> Advantages of LSI 53C895A over others:
> 1.) OS support is great, even for legacy systems: DOS, Win 3.1, Win95,
> NT 4, W2K, XP, Vista, Win7, Linux, etc. I don't know any adapter with
> such wide range of OS support. Also tested up to 2TB of LUNs.

Hmm?  win7 here?  At least the 64bit versions don't ship lsi drivers
(also other oldish hardware such as ac97 sound).  Not sure about the
32bit versions.

legacy systems is *the* strong argument for lsi.

> 2.) OS support out of the box without additional drivers for a lot of
> newer OSes

recent windows systems stopped shipping lsi drivers.
linux systems will ship with virtio-scsi support soon.

> 7.) LSI SCSI DMA technology is fast. I'm getting /dev/null performance
> over 500MB/s ..., optimized for parallel IOPS, etc.

Well, you can't do zerocopy because that is next to impossible to
emulate correctly.  Which puts lsi behind other solutions
performance-wise.  But to keep legacy systems alive performance isn't
the #1 issue.  Likewise the 2T limit ;)

> Not to forget iSCSI which is also current/future SCSI technology ...

Oh, booting from iscsi is supported just fine by iPXE.  It is more a
problem that the guest OS must be able to handle this too ...

cheers,
  Gerd