From owner-freebsd-hackers Tue May 6 18:08:40 1997 Return-Path: Received: (from root@localhost) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.5/8.8.5) id SAA17989 for hackers-outgoing; Tue, 6 May 1997 18:08:40 -0700 (PDT) Received: from genesis.atrad.adelaide.edu.au (genesis.atrad.adelaide.edu.au [129.127.96.120]) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id SAA17978 for ; Tue, 6 May 1997 18:08:35 -0700 (PDT) Received: (from msmith@localhost) by genesis.atrad.adelaide.edu.au (8.8.5/8.7.3) id KAA15806; Wed, 7 May 1997 10:38:16 +0930 (CST) From: Michael Smith Message-Id: <199705070108.KAA15806@genesis.atrad.adelaide.edu.au> Subject: Re: if_de.c ???? In-Reply-To: from Jaye Mathisen at "May 6, 97 01:35:18 pm" To: mrcpu@cdsnet.net (Jaye Mathisen) Date: Wed, 7 May 1997 10:38:15 +0930 (CST) Cc: dennis@etinc.com, tim@futuresouth.com, hackers@FreeBSD.ORG X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4ME+ PL28 (25)] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk Jaye Mathisen stands accused of saying: > > While I rarely agree with dennis, he's dead on with this one. I bought > 30-40 de cards for my 25 or so servers, now only to find it apparently a > dead-end driver, and the Intel card being the card-de-jour (or however > that's spelled). Er, I think Matt Thomas would be very surprised to hear that his driver is "dead". I don't really think you have any sort of right to go making those claims. The bottom line is this : the current crop of 'de' hardware has too many media options for the traditional link* options. NetBSD implemented a new structure for handling this. Matt develops primarily on NetBSD for various reasons. The NetBSD Way of Doing Things had to be integrated into FreeBSD. Peter Wemm has done the hard yards on this; I expect to hear from him shortly that the new if_de driver is in 2.2-stable, or a call for help asking for someone else to pick up where he left off. It is interesting to note amongst all this bitching and whining about the "poor" support for 'de' cards that there has been almost nobody offering any help or support. It's all been "where's my &^%$&^$ de driver right *&^%*&^%*& now". Kinda pathetic, really. Especially from people (30 or 40 cards?) that obviously have the resources, and would be quite happy to benefit from someone else's hard work at no expense to themselves. > And so I'll start purchasing intel cards, and 8 months from now, the > Novell NE2000 cards will be the hot card to have. Or, you can help with the 'de' cards and keep your inventory. > It's like FreeBSD is always at this "80%" useful stage. It always seems > to be burning up 10 hours of time a week just kind of keeping the whole OS > all together. Every upgrade seems to break something that worked fine > before. Significant features don't seem to work when really stressed. I've ranted enough about this before. Let me just say "volunteer testing" one more time. -- ]] Mike Smith, Software Engineer msmith@gsoft.com.au [[ ]] Genesis Software genesis@gsoft.com.au [[ ]] High-speed data acquisition and (GSM mobile) 0411-222-496 [[ ]] realtime instrument control. (ph) +61-8-8267-3493 [[ ]] Unix hardware collector. "Where are your PEZ?" The Tick [[