SUCCESS: Sun Blade 100 with Firewire-attached HDD (IEEE 1394)

[David O'Brien]

On Fri, Jun 17, 2005 at 11:25:34AM +0200, Marius Strobl wrote:
> On Fri, Jun 17, 2005 at 01:09:38AM -0700, David O'Brien wrote:
> > I feel the language is fine.  For entire existence of the FreeBSD/sparc64
> > I've never missed firewire or floppy on my SunBlade 100.  When we wrote
> > the notes, "fully supported" mean the CPU, on-board disk controller (ATA
> > or SCSI), NIC, and sio(4) were fully supported.  For typical development
> > and server deployment that is all that was needed.
> > 
> > There are devices found on some i386 machines that we don't support
> > (wireless NIC and modem, usb2 for a long time), yet most would consider
> > them "fully supported".
> 
> Personally I agree but the "fully supported" in the sparc64 hardware
> notes seems to regularly trick people into thinking that FreeBSD is
> a drop-in replacement for Solaris in all aspects which simply isn't
> true.
> FYI, even sio(4) was never fully supported by the in-tree sources,
> in order to use the NS16650 with sio(4) as a console on sparc64 one
> had to apply the hacks from people.freebsd.org/~tmm. AFAICT for the
> entire existence of FreeBSD/sparc64 the ALI ATA controllers used
> on-board in Blade 100 etc. also were only guaranteed to work at
> UDMA33, regardless whether used with original Sun drives or not
> (f.e. search the freebsd-sparc64 archives for tmm@ talking about
> data corruption at UDMA66). Given such limitations im not sure
> whether it was and is advisable to describe e.g. the Blade 100 as
> "fully supported", even by your definition.

*shrug* I've done 3.5 years of FreeBSD/sparc64 development on a
SunBlade 100.  "Works for me".

-- 
-- David  (obrien at FreeBSD.org)