Date: Mon, 14 Jan 2002 09:18:34 -0500 From: Brian T.Schellenberger <bts@babbleon.org> To: "Anthony Atkielski" <anthony@freebie.atkielski.com>, "FreeBSD Questions" <freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: Re: USB CF reader (SanDisk) epilog Message-ID: <034b54618140e12FE8@mail8.nc.rr.com> In-Reply-To: <01f601c19cd0$5b65e6a0$0a00000a@atkielski.com> References: <002301c19b4e$6ee9b950$0a00000a@atkielski.com> <086093039220d12FE6@Mail6.nc.rr.com> <01f601c19cd0$5b65e6a0$0a00000a@atkielski.com>
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On Monday 14 January 2002 02:52 am, Anthony Atkielski wrote:
> Brian writes:
> > I would say that in general FreeBSD drivers
> > are worse than Windows drivers except for the
> > most common hardware.
>
> A frightening thought, given how badly written most Windows drivers are.
> Bad drivers are the leading cause of system failures on Windows machines,
> and no doubt this is true for FreeBSD as well.
No doubt. I've had a number of FreeBSD crashes from only semi-supported
hardware or experimental or misconfigured drivers.
I might be overstating the problem, though--more common on FreeBSD is to find
hardware that isn't supported at all or where the driver is explicitly not
supported. USB is "relatively" now on FreeBSD, though, and I don't really
trust it too much myself.
>
> > This stands to reason as the hardware manufacturers
> > write the drivers for Windows and/or work with
> > Microsoft, whereas they are generally indifferent
> > to and often actively hostile to freeware O/S developers.
>
> My experience is that almost all drivers provided by hardware manufacturers
> are defective. Hardware manufacturers know their hardware, but they don't
> know anything about the operating systems for which they write their
> drivers, and this is dangerous when you consider that their drivers have to
> run with kernel privileges. It might help if manufacturers released the
> source to their drivers, but for some reason they appear to be unwilling to
> do this.
>
> > Maybe you can do some diagnosis yourself . . .
> > and then they'd work better in the future.
>
> With adequate documentation, I could write a driver for anything. But in
> software engineering, the hardest part of writing anything is finding
> enough documentation to know what to write. Most software developers are
> only partially literate and hate to ever document anything.
>
> > CF memory has the wonderful property that it's
> > not timing-dependent ...
>
> And yet the error I'm getting is a timeout!
Well, that is odd. But it's probably because the card presents itself as a
"virtual disk" and physical disks are not completely time-indepdenent, and
the driver doesn't "know" that's talking to a fake disk that doesn't really
have a spinning platter . . . or maybe it's higher up where the system
figures if it hasn't heard from a disk drive in xx seconds it's not going to
hear from it at all.
Again, my experience is that Linux is the most robust O/S hardwarily
speaking. Most people on the FreeBSD lists would vehemently disagree, of
course. I like the design and control and everything else about FreeBSD; I
now arrange things so that my hardware is "FreeBSD friendly" rather than the
other way 'round so I can run FreeBSD trouble-free.
--
Brian T. Schellenberger . . . . . . . bts@wnt.sas.com (work)
Brian, the man from Babble-On . . . . bts@babbleon.org (personal)
http://www.babbleon.org
-------> Free Dmitry Sklyarov! (let him go home) <-----------
http://www.eff.org http://www.programming-freedom.org
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