Date: Sat, 3 Jun 2006 16:25:48 -0700 (PDT) From: Danial Thom <danial_thom@yahoo.com> To: Ted Mittelstaedt <tedm@toybox.placo.com>, Heinrich Rebehn <rebehn@ant.uni-bremen.de>, questions@freebsd.org Subject: RE: Recommendation for 1000BASE-SX card? Message-ID: <20060603232548.86465.qmail@web33308.mail.mud.yahoo.com> In-Reply-To: <LOBBIFDAGNMAMLGJJCKNAEBFFEAA.tedm@toybox.placo.com>
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The "starving programmer" was an exaggeration used to illustrate a point, I was not seriously suggesting to go out and hire a bad programmer. But, when you buy cheap crappy hardware it is cheap because the manufacturer has hired less talented programmers among other things, and you can only expect something that "works" not that "works well" ---------------------------------- I think its often difficult to distinguish between what is crappy, because good code can make bad hardware look good and vice versa. All ethernet controllers were designed by idiots. My first success story (now I don't want to let on to who I really am so I'll be vague), was an ISA card by a major vendor that locked up regularly, and it had a hideous reputation as being a bad card. It was the only card of its kind, and I needed it badly. They gave me schematics and said that they had tried and tried but couldn't find anything wrong with the card. They had contracted out to some brainfarm to write a driver, and the thing was this beautiful self-contained scheduler (this is like MSDOS 3 mind you) with documented source, the whole deal. Well I tore it apart, simplified the code, got rid of all the soft interrupt passes and cleaned up all the memory management code. Now the card worked like a charm, didn't lock up, ran better than their spec and Mega-Billon$- company couldn't believe that some 23yo kid wrote a driver that a company they paid 100K to couldn't get to work. My point is that until someone writes a really good driver you never know if hardware is any good or not. Now some hardware is hopeless. I'm not sure that the broadcom controllers are that hopeless. But since the intel cards work well and are cheap, who's going to spend the time to pour over the broadcom driver and make it better? There's a ton of I/Os in there that can be streamlined. But who's gonna do it? Its sure not worth my time. DT __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com
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