ASPI - obituary?

PAT LaVarre LAVARRE at iomega.com
Thu Jan 30 19:24:51 PST 1997


* From the SCSI Reflector (scsi at symbios.com), posted by:
* PAT LaVarre <LAVARRE at IOMEGA.COM>
*
Is ASPI dead?

Iomega, for example, if judged by market share,
fell into the "we only make SCSI" category until
the Zip release in '94.  Up until that point, the
way Iomega made their test & manufacturing
software mostly independent of SCSI cards was to
run through ASPI.

Over time it seems ASPI is losing favour as the
people who implement it behave as if they felt no
consideration for the folk who write test
software?

Me, when I qualify a new driver for TEST, I ask
questions like the following - and far, far, far
too often the answers are NO:

... can I transfer more than 64K of data?

... can I attempt precisely 64K of data
	(without hanging the driver)
	(even if it can't transfer that much)

... can I transfer 64K w/out seeing corrupt bytes?

... can I detect overruns of small buffers?
	(e.g. a buffer of just 3 bytes)

... can I detect underruns?
	(i.e. transfers of less than what I expect)
	(by requesting byte count check)
	(i.e. srb[3]=08h or srb[3]=18h)

... can I turn off auto-sense?
	(by setting sense length to zero)

... can I make the Escape key cancel stuff?
	(by virtue of the driver
	returning srb[1] status = 0
	when it encounters significant delay)

... can I set my own timeouts?
	(same technique as for Escape)

... must I count adapters
	(and myself range-check ID's)
	(rather than just trying an ID)

... must I zero the offset of segment:offset ptrs?

Anybody have a more positive experience to report?

Thanks in advance.   Pat LaVarre

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