'hpsa' - A SCSI-based Linux device driver for HP Smart Array Controllers

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Repository (SDR) at http://downloads.linux.hp.com/SDR/. The SDR allows you to use native Linux tools like yum, apt,
and zypper to install HP drivers.
Standard OS utilities
All the usual OS-specific storage management tools work with hpsa. The administrative activities for partitioning,
formatting, creating a file system, managing a logical volume, and device mapping do not change.
Performance
The hpsa driver’s performance is generally comparable to the cciss driver for any combination of controller,
configuration, and I/O application.
What is changing
Hpsa presents array controller and logical disk devices differently than the cciss driver because hpsa is a SCSI lower-
level driver and cciss is a block-layer driver. The hpsa driver takes advantage of standard SCSI layer namespace and
error handling features, so there are some changes in device naming, numbering, and management. Figure 1 illustrates
the I/O layers and the correlation of the hpsa and cciss drivers within the layers.
Figure 1: I/O layers correlate differently to cciss and hpsa drivers.
SCSI compatibility
The hpsa driver enables better and faster compatibility with changes in storage utilities by working directly with the
standard Linux SCSI storage layer. System utilities or applications that make assumptions about storage device names
being /dev/sd* are incompatible with the cciss driver but will work natively with hpsa.