Date: Sat, 11 Oct 1997 19:19:02 +0930 From: Mike Smith <mike@smith.net.au> To: Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.com> Cc: FreeBSD Chat <chat@freebsd.org>, dkelly@hiwaay.net Subject: Re: Linux vs freeBSD Message-ID: <199710110949.TAA01174@word.smith.net.au> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Fri, 10 Oct 1997 18:52:27 %2B0930." <19971010185227.17440@lemis.com>
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> (David Kelly) > > Do we have any examples laying around of FreeBSD wanting for drivers > > that exist in Linux? Or are we simply repeating what's always been said? There are a few that come to mind; the Buslogic Flashpoint controllers, Token Ring cards, some Xircom hardware I believe. > > An example would be ATAPI CDROM's and FreeBSD. In the past FreeBSD's > > ATAPI support was slack. The reason I gathered was that nobody who was > > capable of the task wanted to do it. It's always better to ask about these things. The ATAPI support was slack because the people who demanded it were unwilling to do the work, and the people that were willing and capable didn't have the time or resources. That's mostly not an issue these days. > > Today, I don't know what the status is of the wd driver. But I'd guess > > that its not being carressed into DMA, UltraDMA, mode 4.... the way a > > Linux driver would be. As with ATAPI, its just not as interesting to > > FreeBSD developers as SCSI. That is, of course, complete crap, as anyone that's been following this would be able to observe: - the PIO mode setting has always been the BIOS' responsibility; FreeBSD uses whatever the BIOS set. - DMA and UDMA33 are both supported in 3.x. These aren't hot items for the stability-oriented 2.2, but they exist and seem to work pretty well. > > In the driver discussion, some mention of the sharing of drivers > > between FreeBSD and Linux is needed. This is hard. I guess you can cover the fact that FreeBSD has on some occasions been able to leverage the information obtained by Linux developers in order to create and/or improve drivers, but the Linux driver model and typical source code license is such that it's hard to "share" drivers. mike
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