Managing Receive-Data Buffers

In the SCSI subsystem target-mode interface, the SCSI adapter device driver is responsible for managing the receive-data buffers versus the SCSI device driver because the buffering is dependent upon how the adapter works.

It is not possible for the SCSI device driver to run a single approach that is capable of making full use of the performance advantages of various adapters' buffering schemes. With the SCSI adapter device driver layer performing the buffer management, the SCSI device driver can be interfaced to a variety of adapter types and can potentially get the best possible performance out of each adapter. This approach also allows multiple SCSI target-mode device drivers to be run on top of adapters that use a shared-pool buffer management scheme. This would not be possible if the target-mode device drivers managed the buffers.