SCSI Driver for Hatari and ARAnyM (Linux)

[uweseimet]

SCSI Drivers provide direct device access not just with real SCSI hardware, but also with other interfaces or within a software emulation. There are SCSI Drivers for MagicMac and MagiCPC, and now also the SCSI Driver for Hatari and ARAnyM for Linux. With this driver devices can be directly accessed from within the Atari emulation, e.g. by software like HDDRIVER, ExtenDOS or DISKUS.

For HDDRIVER the mass storage devices connected to a Linux box appear to be devices connected to a real Atari. Because the SCSI Driver manages everything, HDDRIVER is not aware of the actual hardware.
In the screenshot Hatari emulates a TT with access to 4 buses: ACSI, SCSI, IDE (Atari compatible buses, provided by the Hatari core) and Linux Generic SCSI (an additional bus mapping native Linux devices, provided by the SCSI Driver for Hatari). All devices are fully functional, e.g. from the desktop one can copy data from the BD drive to the memory card.

In order to support new hardware interfaces it is strongly recommended to implement a SCSI Driver in order to support the new hardware, and not XHDI. XHDI was designed to exclusively support block devices, whereas a SCSI Driver works on a lower level and can support any kind of device. Alan Hourihane, for instance, implemented a SCSI Driver for his Unicorn USB adapter. As a result HDDRUTIL can be used for partitioning and other device maintenance tasks. For Milan SCSI the situation is similar: HDDRIVER and HDDRUTIL do not know anything at all about how to access PCI SCSI cards, but they support Milan SCSI anyway because Michael Schwingen implemented a SCSI Driver for the Milan.
When there are SCSI Drivers, XHDI for the devices managed by these drivers is automatically supported by HDDRIVER, because HDDRIVER implements XHDI on top of the available SCSI Drivers.

[uweseimet]

With the 1.20 release of the NF_SCSI SCSI Driver two buses (bus A and bus B) are supported. This means that within Hatari or ARAnyM up to 16 (2 * 8) devices can be accessed.