Quality of FreeBSD

[Karl Denninger]

Agreed.

I have a PR open on the ATA issues, particularly with SATA drives, and
have had it open since before 5.4-RELEASE.

It remains open.

Careful selection of what's where can avoid major trouble, but this is
hardware that worked properly on 4.x for a LONG time - its definitely NOT
defective.

This is a major sore spot, and is not a trivial issue by any means.  Disk
I/O is arguably THE major thing that must work right for any operating
system to be usable.

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Karl Denninger (karl at denninger.net) Internet Consultant & Kids Rights Activist
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On Thu, Jul 21, 2005 at 05:46:13PM +0200, Martin wrote:
> Robert Watson wrote:
> >- ATA problems.  Many of these, while a symptom of bugs in the ATA code
> >  running without Giant, were very specific to timing, or divergent/poor
> >  ATA hardware.  As a result, they were difficult to reproduce in any
> >  environment but the original reporting environment.  The same hardware
> >  might perform fine in a FreeBSD developer's system.  Many of these
> >  problems have now been resolved, but some have not.  Often as not, the
> >  problems have to do with retrying requests to drives.
> 
> My system is instable with latest -STABLE kernels, producing ATA DMA
> errors. I also think that this does have directly a connection to buggy
> ATA code. It seems it is something more general.
> 
> > As I mentioned,
> >  we believe the ATA code in 6.x is much more resilient, but right now
> >  what it needs is testing, not merging to 5.x yet.  Fixes require just 
> >  as
> >  much testing as any other change, since a fix for one issue may well
> >  trigger another issue, especially in the world of cheap PC hardware.
> 
> This is true for me. RELENG_6 is great, but there are still annoying
> bugs which prevent me from migrating the system completely. I'm using
> FreeBSD mainly as desktop and I really need bktr(4) to work correctly.
> Then there is some trouble with ath(4) making my notebook unusable.
> 
> To put it straight, there is no FreeBSD branch which works well
> for me since about 2 months. This is frustrating for me, but I try
> to have patience, because you do a great job and btw, I cannot
> imagine to use my PCs without FreeBSD.
> 
> One more thing about "cheap hardware": if you know that a piece of
> hardware is potentially buggy (I mean real BUGS and not missing
> support), please publish your opinion, because I will buy hardware
> FOR FREEBSD, so I avoid major problems. How about test suites for
> ACPI quality, e.g.? Would it be possible? There are people who spend
> time to test FOR YOU, you don't need to buy all the hardware in
> this world.
> 
> Martin
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