From owner-freebsd-hackers Wed Nov 28 20:27:29 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Received: from imo-r10.mx.aol.com (imo-r10.mx.aol.com [152.163.225.106]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id E743837B417; Wed, 28 Nov 2001 20:27:24 -0800 (PST) Received: from Nyteckjobs@aol.com by imo-r10.mx.aol.com (mail_out_v31_r1.9.) id n.14e.4d05ff7 (25307); Wed, 28 Nov 2001 23:27:17 -0500 (EST) From: Nyteckjobs@aol.com Message-ID: <14e.4d05ff7.29371325@aol.com> Date: Wed, 28 Nov 2001 23:27:17 EST Subject: (no subject) To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org, tedm@toybox.placo.com MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mailer: AOL 5.0 for Windows sub 138 Sender: owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG >As I mentioned above, we CAN license the driver code and the DDK for >development. This means that you could produce FreeBSD drivers which we >could then distribute in a binary form under a free end-user license. > >Frankly this is the only way I can see that FreeBSD drivers for the 5xx >series would ever come about. Porting SAND over, while having >advantages >of long term support, is just overkill for this, besides which it's unlikely >you will get a FreeBSD developer to work on GPL code. >This would end up putting a WANic 5xx driver into the same status as the >drivers for the Emerging Technologies, or Sangoma sync cards, which both >come >with binary-only FreeBSD drivers. It would actually have a leg up over >those drivers because it would have Netgraph hooks and I believe that the >Sangoma drivers don't (but I've never worked with the Sangoma cards so I >don't know for certain) The concept that "netgraph hooks" are a "leg up" on say, ETs drivers that have integrated bandwidth management and prioritization, WAN bridging support, load balancing and a probably 25% performance advantage is a bit entertaining. Unless you need to do some convoluted encapsulation netgraph is, aside from being appallingly non-standard to anything else in the market, not much of an "advantage", and its a poster child for the trade off of "flexibility" versus performance. Lets face it. If you were going to sit down and design an interface for frame relay, multi-protocol support, etc, you'd have to be smoking something pretty strong to come up with netgraph. But its free and there is source, so it must be great! To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message