Sun Common SCSI Architecture Overview

The Sun Common SCSI Architecture (SCSA) is the Solaris DDI/DKI programming interface for the transmission of SCSI commands from a target driver to a host bus adapter driver. This interface is independent of the type of host bus adapter hardware, the platform, the processor architecture, and the SCSI command being transported across the interface.

Conforming to the SCSA enables the target driver to pass SCSI commands to target devices without knowledge of the hardware implementation of the host bus adapter.

The SCSA conceptually separates building the SCSI command from transporting the command with data across the SCSI bus. The architecture defines the software interface between high-level and low-level software components. The higher level software component consists of one or more SCSI target drivers, which translate I/O requests into SCSI commands appropriate for the peripheral device. The following example illustrates the SCSI architecture.

Figure 17-1  SCSA Block Diagram

The lower-level software component consists of a SCSA interface layer and one or more host bus adapter drivers. The target driver is responsible for the generation of the proper SCSI commands required to execute the desired function and for processing the results.