From owner-freebsd-smp Wed Jun 7 23:19:19 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-smp@freebsd.org Received: from chopper.Poohsticks.ORG (chopper.poohsticks.org [63.227.60.73]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 05A8537BA19 for ; Wed, 7 Jun 2000 23:19:16 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from drew@chopper.Poohsticks.ORG) Received: from chopper.Poohsticks.ORG (drew@localhost.poohsticks.org [127.0.0.1]) by chopper.Poohsticks.ORG (8.10.1/8.10.1) with ESMTP id e586JDR01400; Thu, 8 Jun 2000 00:19:13 -0600 Message-Id: <200006080619.e586JDR01400@chopper.Poohsticks.ORG> To: chad@DCFinc.com Cc: freebsd-smp@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Hardware and MS rant Was: Tyan Thunder 2400/i840 SMP no good In-reply-to: Your message of "Wed, 07 Jun 2000 22:53:04 PDT." <200006080553.WAA15952@freeway.dcfinc.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-ID: <1396.960445153.1@chopper.Poohsticks.ORG> Date: Thu, 08 Jun 2000 00:19:13 -0600 From: Drew Eckhardt Sender: owner-freebsd-smp@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.org In message <200006080553.WAA15952@freeway.dcfinc.com>, chad@DCFinc.com writes: >As I recall, Mike Smith wrote: >> Yes. I've even see this with "high quality" SDRAM; the i840 board I'm >> currently using has some cheap and nasty 64MB DIMMs which work fine, but >> most of the "high quality" parts I've tried have failed miserably. > >Does this seem like a problem to anyone besides me? Sure. >Given the MoBo's sold at Fry's with the memory sold at Fry's will run >Windows98 without falling over in a way that is not clearly Windows >fault, then we (FreeBSD) will look bad if we can't run on the same >hardware. Good. Joe Random Clueless Luser will be scared off by the reports he sees on free unix hardware compatability problems, stick to windows, and not burden us with questions that are answered in the FAQs . With a more intelligent user community, unix software will be written for functionality (like nvi, with infinite undo), and not crippled to make it drool proof (like Netscape, where regexes weren't included in the released versions because "they would confuse people"). >Can we claim (with a straight face) that there is a legitimate reason >FreeBSD is more picky about its hardware platform than Windows/NT >Server? Yes. 1. Hardware is thoroughly tested and tweaked to work with common Windows/NT applications because otherwise it won't sell. Since failures under FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, RedHat, Caldera, SUSE, or the free unix du jour will have a negligible impact on sales but a substantial impact on time to market it doesn't get tested and problems not detected in testing are more likely. 2. Many free unix programs are more complicated than their commercial counterparts. This means they do a better job (compare the code generated by GCC 1.37 to that from the Microsoft compiler resold by SCO at the same time), at the expense of more complex memory access patterns that are more likely to trigger bugs (search your Usenet archives for signal 11 or SIGSEGV and gcc). >If it were not, these MoBo/memory configurations would be >being shoved back up the >of the vendors when >the customers tried to run the software package that is on 90% of >the Intel boxen out there and failed. The accepted practice when something fails under Windows is to 1. Reboot 2. Rerun the application 3. Reboot 4. Reinstall the application 5. Reboot 6. Rerun the application 7. Reboot 8. Install all of the service packs 9. Reboot 10. Rerun the application 11. Reboot 12. Reinstall Windows du jour 13. Reboot 14. Install the service packs 15. Reboot 16. Reinstall the application 17. Reboot 18. Rerun the application 19. Bang head against wall in frustration 20. Live with the problem People's expectations of personal computer (PC, Mac, TRS80, Commodore 64, etc) software aren't very high, and they manage when it fails. Common hardware + driver + applications configurations DO fail with great regularity under Windows, and beyond a quiet "Oh yeah, that happened to me too. Buy a different board" people do nothing constructive about the situation. For that matter, some make a sport out of it. "Sure, my over-clocked system won't run the Wazzyding benchmark, but it runs 3 frames per second faster under quake demo". (Yeah, I'm feeling cranky tonight). To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-smp" in the body of the message