From owner-freebsd-bugs Sun May 21 21:21:30 1995 Return-Path: bugs-owner Received: (from majordom@localhost) by freefall.cdrom.com (8.6.10/8.6.6) id VAA09150 for bugs-outgoing; Sun, 21 May 1995 21:21:30 -0700 Received: from Root.COM (implode.Root.COM [198.145.90.1]) by freefall.cdrom.com (8.6.10/8.6.6) with ESMTP id VAA09138 for ; Sun, 21 May 1995 21:21:28 -0700 Received: from corbin.Root.COM (corbin.Root.COM [198.145.90.18]) by Root.COM (8.6.8/8.6.5) with ESMTP id VAA23389; Sun, 21 May 1995 21:24:31 -0700 Received: from localhost (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by corbin.Root.COM (8.6.11/8.6.5) with SMTP id VAA03476; Sun, 21 May 1995 21:21:33 -0700 Message-Id: <199505220421.VAA03476@corbin.Root.COM> To: Charles Henrich cc: freebsd-bugs@FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: MAJOR problem with FreeBSD-2.0-RELEASE In-reply-to: Your message of "Sun, 21 May 95 23:15:40 EDT." <199505220315.UAA07572@freefall.cdrom.com> From: David Greenman Reply-To: davidg@Root.COM Date: Sun, 21 May 1995 21:21:32 -0700 Sender: bugs-owner@FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk >I will not be pursuaded to change my stance on Bus Logic due to past >record. There current record is horrible, and that is enough for me >to pursuade people to seek alternatives, realize I sell these products, > ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ > >Wait a minute, your telling me that because the support for the buslogic cards >are broken (when not two weeks ago it was the card suggested as the best and >most reliable by many on the freebsd-hackers lists) that we should buy >different cards instead of fixing the broken drivers? If this is how broken >drivers are handled (okay, dont use THAT one) FreeBSD has some serious >problems... Tell me Im misunderstanding something here, afterall I know I >chose FreeBSD over Linux primarily because I felt it was better supported with >a central core team and such. Is this not a true statement? I don't know who recommended Buslogic cards a week ago, but I can say that I've personally had bad experiance with Buslogic tech support for the last several months. I've made multiple calls to them, spent more than $50 in long distance waiting on hold, and when I finally gave up waiting on hold and left messages instead, my calls were never returned. I've never been treated this way by any other company, and this bad experiance really leaves a sour taste. There is a difference between what is the best supported card in FreeBSD and what is the best supported card by the vendor. FreeBSD has good Buslogic support - I use a bt-946C myself with little trouble. Buslogic, however, has lousy support for their products. If you happen to have a card with broken firmware, you're screwed. If you can't even get your damn drives to probe correctly in the BIOS, then you don't have a snowball's chance of getting the thing booted. In my case, I was trying to get help from Buslogic on a problem where the card's BIOS would sometimes hang just before starting the device probe on the SCSI bus - it made rebooting wcarchive extremely risky; more than 2/3rds of the time the machine would hang rather than boot. It wasn't a FreeBSD problem because it would happen even if the machine was freshly powered on - and it never got far enough to read any blocks off the disk. The best working SCSI driver in FreeBSD at the moment is the one for the Adaptec 2x40 controllers. The card doesn't have any BIOS hang problems, and Justin Gibbs has been very good about fixing all the bugs. 2940's is what I ended up using in wcarchive - 3 of them. -DG