RE: Recommendation for 1000BASE-SX card?
- From: "Ted Mittelstaedt" <tedm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 3 Jun 2006 15:30:31 -0700
-----Original Message-----
From: owner-freebsd-questions@xxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:owner-freebsd-questions@xxxxxxxxxxx]On Behalf Of Danial Thom
Sent: Friday, June 02, 2006 10:08 AM
To: Ted Mittelstaedt; Chuck Swiger
Cc: questions@xxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: RE: Recommendation for 1000BASE-SX card?
--- Ted Mittelstaedt <tedm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
-----Original Message-----Behalf Of Chuck Swiger
From: owner-freebsd-questions@xxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:owner-freebsd-questions@xxxxxxxxxxx]On
Sent: Thursday, June 01, 2006 8:24 AMcard?
To: danial_thom@xxxxxxxxx
Cc: questions@xxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: Recommendation for 1000BASE-SX
opinions about
Very well, let me put it another way: if your
what's wrongbetter to rely on a
differ from most other people, you might do
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 becausedon't seem to be
some people
regard their own opinions so highly that they
aware thateffective.
other approaches exist and might even prove
Like you?
businessesClearly there are drivers that are well
supported and drivers that aren't. There are
people out there trying to run their
everythingand you seem to want to pretend that
tweakedis just peachy and that everything can be
situation(s),and tuned a bit to be usable.
I don't know about either the OP or your
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'mof the time, on
generally of
the opinion that FreeBSD works just fine, most
most hardware,entirely usable.
without any specific tweaking or tuning to be
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 asApple 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 aFreeBSD-driver to Windows-driver
performance comparison, providing #'s andenough 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? :)
Naw, once you got the meds right, you started making
more sense. ;-)
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.
I don't think it's that being the problem. I think
the problem is that the engineers at places like HP and
ASUS and such, know perfectly well the Broadcom and the
Realtek and the other cheapo-crappy ethernet chipsets
are garbage. But, I think they figure that they are not
going to throw expensive programming time on solving the
problems of those chips in software. I think they spend
the expensive programming time on their high-end gear, which
has the Intel chipset and the other good stuff, high end
parts in it.
There was a time when name brand companies like Dell, HP
Gateway, Micron, etc. etc. made 2 lines of computers.
Cheapo crappy desktop gear, and expensive high quality
server gear.
What I think ruined it is too many people pressing cheapo
crappy desktop gear into use as servers, it was cutting
into the high-end server market in a big way. So, the
Dell's and the HP's of the world realized they needed to
create server lines (and the motherboard manufacturers
realized this too with motherboard lines) that were marketed
as servers, but were a lot cheaper than their high end
servers. This would allow them to package the exact same
crappy desktop parts in a box marked as a "server" and
costing twice as much, yet not as much as the really good
quality server gear. And so that is what is going on
these days.
The really high end gear, which is rapidly vanishing, the
motherboard and box vendors are still putting time into
work on drivers and such. But, for the low end gear they
are just buying commodity chipsets, and they are telling those
commodity vendors (like realtek) that they simply won't
buy their stuff unless the chip comes with drivers. So,
the commodity vendors slap together the minimum effort
needed to get the chip and software driver out the door,
and the motherboard and box vendors simply take the driver
source and replace "Realtek" with "HP" and sometimes they
don't even bother to do even that much. And if the driver
has some bug in it that is intermittent, well who cares,
the Windows users will just blame it on a virus or something,
as long as the bug is infrequent enough that the user
does not return the hardware to the dealer.
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.
The situation is analogous to the auto manufacturing market in
a great many ways. Over the last 15 years computer manufacturing
has really grown up until it's just like auto manufacturing
today. We no longer have some of the really horrible gear out
there like the 80486 50Mhz chips and their associated support
chips that would lock up for no reason at least 6 times a day.
But, we also no longer have some really cool and amazing gear like
the NetFrames which most people didn't understand how good they
were because they were so figging expensive.
Today, everyone has the cost/benefit calculators out and is
cutting every corner in the book. Need a server? Well the
rack mounted stuff is an extra $50 so we will just set up some
card tables and get minitowers. Need a UPS? Well that there
300VA unit with the itty-bitty-titty-batteries in it that has
a runtime of 5 minutes on a good day will shut the server down
without scratching it's disks, so lets buy that instead of that
APC 600VA unit with the extra batteries that has a 4 hour runtime
and a network card in it to where you can plan for battery
change out in advance.
And that's just the end users, the manufacturers are doing the
same thing. This is exactly the reason that Microsoft has slipped
their new Windows version. They are waiting for the cheapo
crap hardware to catch up.
Ted
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