Arnaud (and others), Liaising with vendors is not an easy task. The reason why Intel (and other vendors) don't supply detailed history and reasoning for their development efforts is that their engineers are likely tasked with "making it work" versus "writing lots of stuff down for public release." In some instances, the vendor support of FreeBSD (and "free" open source in general) is done as a side-project by some of the engineers inside the company.
So in this case, you may find that Jack and the other engineers at Intel just don't have the time or resources to dedicate the kinds of feedback and support you seem to be after. He and others likely have a huge set of tasks to do at work and none of them officially include "support FreeBSD/Linux developers by providing detailed feedback and assistance." So whenever Jack pops up to help out, he's likely doing it in his spare time. :-) Developers can and will disable or remove functionality which is problematic because they don't have the time or resources to support it. Users may wish to turn on unsupported features and then will complain loudly when they don't work; even giving up and moving to another piece of equipment because of perceived issues. I agree that it would be nice if the developers included _all_ features, unsupported or not, so that developers can choose to work on them if they wish. It however is a trade-off between trying to provide developers with more useful things to tinker with and not increasing support load from users (and other developers) who seek to use incomplete features. I hope this helps. Adrian _______________________________________________ freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hackers To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-hackers-unsubscr...@freebsd.org"
