On Thu, Sep 25, 2008 at 21:59, Miles Nordin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >>>>>> "wm" == Will Murnane <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > > wm> I'd rather have a working closed blob than a driver that is > wm> Free Software for a device that is faulty. Ideals are very > wm> nice, but broken hardware isn't. > > except, > > 1. part of the reason the closed Solaris drivers are (also) broken, > IMHO, is that they're closed, so highly-invested competent people > can't fix them if they happen to be on the wrong side of the wall. I agree this is an issue. But as I said, I'd rather have a working closed driver than a broken open one.
> 2. Linux has open drivers for the Marvell chip that work better than > Sun's closed driver (snip) That's not my experience. I bought my Marvell card around 2005, and at that point I used Linux drivers. Drivers for the card at that point did not support DMA, but were fairly reliable. In late 2006 or so, DMA support was finally added, so I gleefully installed a new kernel and was happy. Until I realized that my data was corrupt. This is for a home system, so I didn't have checksums for the data before the corruption, but I started to hear glitches in music playback. At that point I switched to Solaris, and was very glad for the drivers that didn't cause corruption---and the filesystem that could tell me when things went wrong. I did have a problem with disks falling off the card, so I posted to the storage-discuss mailing list [2]. Despite being on the wrong side of the wall, the drivers were updated fairly soon thereafter, and my problem was solved [1]. The system worked quite well for me in this instance. > 3. The position is incredibly short-sighted. Imagine the quality of > driver we'd have right now if _everyone_ refused to sign that > damned paper, not just the Linux people. We would have a better > driver. It would be open, too, but open or not it would be > better. Not necessarily. Suppose that the corporation making the hardware released its own drivers, for Windows and Linux, say, and didn't release specs to anyone else, even under NDA conditions. Then nobody gets "good" drivers (ones that correctly use all the features the hardware has). I agree that having complete hardware specs is a very helpful thing to make drivers. But they're not strictly necessary, as the Linux/BSD folks have shown. > 4. there are missing features like NCQ, hotplug, port-multiplier > support, all highly relevant to ZFS, for which we will have to > wait longer because we've accepted closed drivers. That's true. But honestly, I don't see those features (with the exception of hot-plug) as being all that necessary. Port multipliers are uncommon and don't perform as well as they could, and NCQ seems to me to be something the OS could do better than the drive firmware. > 5. The Sil 3124 chip works fine on Linux. I have not tried the 3114, > but at least on Linux it is part of libata, their SATA framework, > not supported in remedial PATA mode, so it's at least more of a > first-class driver in Linux than in Solaris, if not simply a > better one. IMHO, attempting to make SilImage controllers work well is lipstick on a pig. Working around the bugs in the hardware is not worth the effort. > I just want an open driver that works well for some > fairly-priced card I can actually buy. This I can agree with. Despite my objections to "free" drivers being inherently better than "closed" ones, I do like the idea of being able to have a completely transparent machine, where I can inspect every piece of software. I would be more than happy to buy such hardware were it available, but in the interim I will continue to suggest and buy LSI's products, which are not free but which have good drivers for them. > The open driver isn't > obtainable as an add-on card The ICH series would indeed be nice to see as an addon card of some sort. > If there _is_ an open vs. closed trade-off, the track record so > far suggests a different trade-off than what you suggest: you can > have closed drivers if you really want them, but they'll be more > broken than the open ones. That may be the case in the larger picture, but in my experience I've seen otherwise. Will [1]: http://www.mail-archive.com/zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org/msg14188.html [2]: http://osdir.com/ml/os.solaris.opensolaris.storage.general/2007-08/msg00054.html _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
