RE: Recommendation for 1000BASE-SX card?



--- Ted Mittelstaedt <tedm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:



-----Original Message-----
From: owner-freebsd-questions@xxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:owner-freebsd-questions@xxxxxxxxxxx]On
Behalf Of Chuck Swiger
Sent: Thursday, June 01, 2006 8:24 AM
To: danial_thom@xxxxxxxxx
Cc: questions@xxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: Recommendation for 1000BASE-SX
card?



Very well, let me put it another way: if your
opinions about
what's wrong
differ from most other people, you might do
better to rely on a
discussion
involving facts rather than opinions.

Or, it could simply be that he's not doing what
most people
are doing, so he is going to run into trouble
that most people
don't run into.

I mention this because
some people
regard their own opinions so highly that they
don't seem to be
aware that
other approaches exist and might even prove
effective.


Like you?

Clearly there are drivers that are well
supported and drivers that aren't. There are
people out there trying to run their
businesses
and you seem to want to pretend that
everything
is just peachy and that everything can be
tweaked
and tuned a bit to be usable.

I don't know about either the OP or your
situation(s),

Then, pray tell, don't comment. Instead thank
your lucky stars
that you have not had to deal with that kind of
problem.

but I'm
generally of
the opinion that FreeBSD works just fine, most
of the time, on
most hardware,
without any specific tweaking or tuning to be
entirely usable.


It does not. In reality, current versions of
FreeBSD work better
on current versions of hardware. FreeBSD has a
terrible history
of breaking things that used to work on old
hardware, then
when someone complains that something is
broken, the developers
in effect tell them their old hardware is
crappy junk and to buy new
hardware.

Try running FreeBSD 6.X on a 80486 or Pentium
system. FreeBSD 4.11
runs just fine on that hardware, if a bit
slowly. But, I don't need
speed to control my garden sprinklers.

Now, it is true that sometimes backwards
compatibility can hurt you,
it can cause you to maintain interfaces and
structures that conflict
with support of new hardware, it can sometimes
put you into
situations that cannot be automatically
resolved, thus you have to
create a knob for the user to twaddle one way
or another, depending
on what hardware they have or what they want to
do. It can suck
off developer time to maintain old junk that
only a few people use,
instead of putting in support for new crap that
a lot of people use.
So there is a balance beam of too much
backwards compatability
and not enough of it. Microsoft is most
definitely way far on the
side of bending over backwards to support
everything, but most people
don't realize that FreeBSD is way far on the
other side of sacrificing
hardware support at the drop of a hat when
people lose interest
in it.

That's true of some other platforms, such as
Apple hardware and
MacOS X, or
even Sun/SPARC boxes, as well. YMMV.


Total apples and oranges comparison, not
relevant to anything.

If you have specific problems or a
FreeBSD-driver to Windows-driver
performance comparison, providing #'s and
enough details to
reproduce would be
helpful.

That has been done with the Broadcom driver
exhaustively in the
PR database, there's at least a dozen PRs on
problems related
to that chip. However it has not resulted in
much code to fix
the problem, or even interest among committers
to apply the fixes
that have been posted. So no, I don't think
that doing that
is helpful at all. In fact, I really think the
PR system has
gotten pretty much broken these days, there's
too many bugs and
not enough people working on them, and more
coming in every
day.

What is needed is some developers putting some
time into
knocking down the bugs in the PR database, but
instead we have
the foundation dumping money into funding
students on projects
like "The Summer of Code" which basically ends
up creating a lot
of half-finished efforts that may or may not
eventually get
integrated into the operating system at some
point down the road.

Nobody wants to fix other people's bugs, that's
boring stuff,
that is the one area of Open Source where
commercial software
companies have a leg up over us. A commercial
company can find
some starving programmer and pay him, then put
a manager over him to
keep jerking the paycheck string to keep him on
task to do the
icky programming. Open Source has real
difficulty with the concept
that some things in it are broken, rather
ickely broken, and
totally un-fun to work on, and the only way
your going to get
them fixed is by whipping some slave until they
do the filthy
task. People would rather spend the gold that
they have on
nice, pleasant projects that treat everyone
nicely and look good
on Resumes, and are not icky, nasty,
uncomfortable things to
do that make you late for dinner.

Ted


What's going on Ted, have you jumped ship since I
last came up for air? :)

Its easy enough for commercial companies to fix
the bugs if they need to use the broadcom
drivers. There's just little incentive to donate
the code back with this bunch of rude,
incompetent clowns that have become the FreeBSD
micky mouse club. There was a time when you could
discuss an issue with Matt, Mike and Terry and
hammer out a solution. Now you've got a bunch of
gaming jockeys who know as much about hardware as
my Mom. And that ain't much, sadly.

DT

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