
                    
      Adaptec 7800 Family Manager for NetWare 3.1x - Driver Version 1.10
      ==================================================================

This subdirectory contains Adaptec's Novell solution for the AIC-7800 Family of
Host Adapters.  This includes:

      AHA-2910      PCI-to-Fast SCSI (non-bootable)
      AHA-2940      PCI-to-Fast SCSI
      AHA-2940W     PCI-to-Fast and Wide Single-Ended SCSI
      AHA-2944W     PCI-to-Fast and Wide Differential SCSI
      AHA-2940Ultra PCI-to-Wide UltraSCSI
      AHA-3940      MultiChannel PCI-to-Fast SCSI
      AHA-3940W     MultiChannel PCI-to-Fast and Wide SCSI
      AIC-7850      Single-Chip PCI-to-Fast SCSI
      AIC-7870      Single-Chip PCI-to-Fast and Wide SCSI
      AIC-7880      Single-Chip PCI-to-UltraSCSI


NOTE: To use CD-ROMs in conjunction with these drivers, EZ-SCSI version 3.03 
or above must be installed.

This subdirectory contains only the driver for Adaptec's AIC-7800 Family of Host 
Adapters for NetWare 386 v3.11 and v3.12 SCSI and Advanced SCSI Programming
Interface (ASPI) managers. All of Adaptec's NetWare 386 drivers have full
support for standard SCSI disk drives, "NetWare Ready" drives, and removable
media disk drives (including optical drives).

The driver also contains a built-in ASPI manager.  This allows for other
NetWare Loadable Modules (NLMs) to gain access to the host adapter.
Given the flexibility of ASPI, several companies are currently providing
server-based tape backup solutions through ASPI.  SBackup is a server based
tape backup solution which is shipped by Novell with NetWare 3.1x.  SBackup
supports the ASPI interface.  There are other ASPI modules already developed
or under development.  A programming specification is available from Adaptec
if you are interested in writing your own NetWare 386 ASPI module.

To load the driver:    

            :load [path] aic7870 [options]

If your file server does a lot of IO operations and you want to try optimizing
its performance, you can adjust the "max_tags=?" and "max_notags"
command line switch.  These switches control the maximum number of tagged
and non-tagged commands outstanding at a given device, respectively.
Refer to your disk-drive's documentation to determine if tagged-queuing is
supported, and the maximum number of outstanding commands supported.
Default values are 8 and 2, respectively.  Examples of changing this feature
are below:

            :load aic7870 max_tags=2 max_nontags=1
      or           
            :load aic7870 tag_disable=ffff max_nontags=1

The first example is set for tag-queuing drives and the second case is for 
non-tag-queuing drives. The max_tags parameter can be set as 2, 4, 6, 8, or
10.  The max_non_tags parameter can be set as 1 or 2.  Larger values give
the drives more opportunity for optimization, but take up more memory
in the server.  In some instances, drives may not support the driver's 
maximum count, or may suffer starvation problems with large counts.

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The driver command line option 'start_unit' was added after the manual was
printed.

   Option: start_unit     Default Value: 00h     Range: 00-ffh (bitmask)

The start_unit switch also exists for aspicd.dsk.  In this case, the
default is ffffh (all targets).  It may need to be turned off to avoid SCSI
bus hangs caused by multiple-LUN CD-ROMs.  The start_unit switch on
aic7870.dsk will not filter commands intended for CD-ROMs.
