Quality of FreeBSD

[Mike Tancsa]

At 04:22 PM 21/07/2005, Karl Denninger wrote:

>ATA-NG (Soren's new code) is not (from what I understand) in the 5.x
>codebase.

No, but its quite different from what was in 4.x.



>My understanding is that the 5.x code is a half-baked version of ATA-NG,
>and IMHO it had no business going into a PRODUCTION release in the state
>that it was pushed over.

It works quite well for many people.  It might be just half-baked for the 
controller you are using.  Or perhaps the controller chipset is just half 
baked.
Looks at some of the comments in the LINUX driver for example

*      After the IDENTIFY [PACKET] DEVICE step is complete, and a
  *      device is known to be present, this function is called.
  *      We apply two errata fixups which are specific to Silicon Image,
  *      a Seagate and a Maxtor fixup.
  *
  *      For certain Seagate devices, we must limit the maximum sectors
  *      to under 8K.
  *
  *      For certain Maxtor devices, we must not program the drive
  *      beyond udma5.
  *
  *      Both fixups are unfairly pessimistic.  As soon as I get more
  *      information on these errata, I will create a more exhaustive
  *      list, and apply the fixups to only the specific
  *      devices/hosts/firmwares that need it.
  *
  *      20040111 - Seagate drives affected by the Mod15Write bug are 
blacklisted
  *      The Maxtor quirk is in the blacklist, but I'm keeping the original
  *      pessimistic fix for the following reasons...
  *      - There seems to be less info on it, only one device gleaned off the
  *      Windows driver, maybe only one is affected.  More info would be 
greatly
  *      appreciated.




>Given that we were all "strongly" encouraged to upgrade to 5.x for production
>machines a few months ago it was a truly ugly surprise to find that current
>production hardware which ran just fine on 4.x was hosed to the point of
>unusability with 5.x as a consequence of serious (some would say CRITICAL)
>driver issues.
Why not stick with 4.x if it works for you.  When you see that your 
particular device driver gets fixed then try it out on a test machine.  It 
might never, it might next month.  This is open source remember. If its 
very critical to use this particular bit of hardware, see if Soren has this 
hardware to even test on.  You like the cards, why not send him one.  He 
might be interested in fixing it when he has an actual card to test with.

         ---Mike