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Date:      Mon, 12 Oct 1998 12:13:29 -0700
From:      Mike Smith <mike@smith.net.au>
To:        "Kenneth D. Merry" <ken@plutotech.com>
Cc:        mike@smith.net.au (Mike Smith), cvs-committers@FreeBSD.ORG, cvs-all@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: cvs commit: src/sys/cam/scsi scsi_da.c 
Message-ID:  <199810121913.MAA07536@dingo.cdrom.com>
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Mon, 12 Oct 1998 12:57:34 MDT." <199810121857.MAA25903@panzer.plutotech.com> 

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> Mike Smith wrote...
> > 
> > I think what this is telling us is that attempting to use anything other
> > than the least common denominator as the default is a Bad Idea.
> > 
> > Don't kid yourselves folks; you're not going to manage to add quirk 
> > entries for all the drives and firmware revisions that screw up royally 
> > when you try to do fancy things to them.  Better to add quirk entries 
> > for the drives that get it _right_.
> > 
> > Shipping a release with this sort of dangerous behaviour enabled is
> > going to be a support _nightmare_.  I realise you folks aren't in the
> > support firing line, but for the sake of those that are, not to mention
> > the extremely negative publicity this sort of problem will cause, please
> > consider turning it off.
> 
> Somehow I'm not surprised that someone responded to that commit with a "sky
> is falling" message.  I wish people would be a little slower with the
> knee-jerk reactions.

This isn't a "knee-jerk reaction".  I've been watching and weighing the 
situation, and particularly the symptoms, since they first started to 
manifest.

The "sky is (not) falling"; you probably won't even hear the noise.  
But a large proportion of people with broken-but-not-quirked drives are 
going to bitch about their systems not rebooting, or their drives 
having to be power-cycled, etc.

I also asked you to "consider" turning it off.  This means "please
weight the issues", and implies "please offer a reasonable
justification, becase we are going to have to use this justification to
placate the plaintiffs".

> Cache sync has been turned on in the DA driver for a very long time now
> (since the first revision, June 27th, 1997) and there have been very
> few problems with it.  By far, most drives out there do something
> reasonable when they get this command.

There were "very few problems" with CAM in general until it reached a
slightly wider audience with its incoporation into -current.  The
audience for the 3.0 release will be at least an order of magnitude
larger again.  The problems may well be trivial and confined to a tiny 
corner of the userbase, but there will be people in that corner 
nonetheless.

> I think there are plenty of other things in -current that are much more
> likely to cause support nightmares and bad publicity.

Indeed.  Don't think that you're somehow being singled out for "special
treatment" here.


-- 
\\  Sometimes you're ahead,       \\  Mike Smith
\\  sometimes you're behind.      \\  mike@smith.net.au
\\  The race is long, and in the  \\  msmith@freebsd.org
\\  end it's only with yourself.  \\  msmith@cdrom.com



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