[OpenIndiana-discuss] Joerg? USB bugs in Solaris __/__ USB mass storage equality or lack thereof

[Martin Bochnig]

> I attached it to a Blade 2000 and used it for Xorg.


Ok, of course the SB2000 natively only comes with USB 1.1, but I have
a NEC based USB card in it.
The External Maxtor 300GB drive enclosure had both USB2 and FireWire connectors.
I cannot recall anymore, in which month of 2005 I plugged the NEC USB
card into the SB2000. At first the 300GB drive had been connected via
FireWire, which the SB2000 natively has. I then moved to USB2.0
because there were odd unreliabilities, if you connected 2 external
drives to both of the FireWire ports and wanted to write to both
devices at once.

With USB2 multiple drives connected then worked reliably.
However, there is really one thing that Sun broke, if we speak about
USB2: I always wondered, why at first it was possible without problems
to write CD's/DVD's on external burners that were connected through
USB2.
I believe that was still on Solaris 9, just after Sun had done the
USB2 port and DDK.
Later on they broke it, and since then I have not been able anymore,
to successfully burn media via USB2.
You would always get I/O errors and the burn would fail. I tried this
with 1 IDE burner connected via USB2 to SPARC and x64, and re-tried
this year under OI and also Oracle Solaris 11 x86, with 2 different
SATA burners connected via 3 different USB bridges: Always the same,
doesn't work, same on SPARC and x64    :(

Interesting: If you connect the burners via FireWire, these problems
do not exist!
I asked Joerg Schilling about it. And he not only confirmed all this,
but said, that he had tried to point this out to Sun a million times,
but they did not want to listen! He says, that they knowingly BROKE
the SCSI (over USB) framework. I have no knowledge of these parts of
code. So I simply repeat, what he has said years ago.
As we now have Illumos, maybe Joerg can fix these bugs. I have no clue.




> --
> regards
>    %martin bochnig