>>>>> "jcm" == James C McPherson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
jcm> Can I assume that my "2008-07-26 post" was in fact two jcm> messages that were sent to you and cc'd to zfs-discuss: jcm> http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/zfs-discuss/2008-July/049605.html jcm> and jcm> http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/zfs-discuss/2008-July/049607.html Yeah, the second. I thought your second message was saying there's no source for mega_sas. In context, we were following up to an osnews forum posting in which some angry person was saying there was no source for mega_sas, which you didn't deny and then offered the alternate BSD driver, so I got confused. jcm> If you read through that code, you should be able to see jcm> that it isn't a shim, either. no, I can't read code that well. If I wanted to determine that for sure without asking others I'd have to understand the build procedure really well and watch the thing build, or else rely on some license/legal framework like the ``Taints kernel'' message emitted by Linux when loading proprietary modules. jcm> I don't know why you would think it might be a shim. nothing personal about Solaris. people everywhere are getting screwed (or at least confused) by shim drivers. Now that free software is more mainstream, the attacks on it have become incredibly creative, and to my view often very effective. jcm> And finally, no, you won't get source for the version which is jcm> integrated into a Solaris 10 Update. It shouldn't be too jcm> different from the version which is in OpenSolaris, but nobody jcm> has ever claimed otherwise. Is this the heart of the problem? I think it's important, and good that you brought it up. So, the source in hg & src.opensolaris.org never includes the Sol10 stable branch? I've always wondered that and never been able to figure out out. At some point, not necessarily disclosed, the sources currently on mercurial will be taken back inside the wall where they'll have the bugs thrashed out of them before they become the next release of stable Solaris? On Linux, the GPL ensures that you can always get source even for the stable version of the OS on which you've bought support, not just the development version. Nothing can be ``taken back inside.'' The difference is no big deal if your goal is to work on big bugs, or contribute new drivers and subsystems to Sun. If your goals are those of a modest sysadmin, to fix your own small bugs locally, or disable some ZFS sanity check to recover a pool that won't import, no source for the stable version does matter. But that wasn't what I was thinking in this thread. I just thought there was no source for mega_sas. so... great! I guess the comparison I settled on was Solaris mega_sas vs. Solaris domU/Linux {anychip,Sil3124}. I had some other concerns, most resolved by other posters' reports and a few not, but no need to repeat them. If one's been burned enough though, he can always imagine more concerns---if it turns out this card has some 1MByte ROM chip running a whole proprietary vxworks image, so that even with a free software driver you're separated from the SATA interface so much that you can't implement new QoS ideas or NCQ or PMP support or fix USCSI/smartctl or make a comstar Target Mode, while on cheaper junky chips you can do those things....well, at least there's still Sil3124 source too. I would say about all my speculative concerns, ``try it and see,'' but part of the point I see in this process, is that mainstream users should exercise some vigilance to keep space open for a few others on the fringe who may be particularly brilliant, motivated, and creative, but without others' vigilance hamstrung by having no truly free platform. And by the time you've ``tried it and seen,'' you've already been fooled into handing over the cash, wasted a bunch of time doing work for free without achieving freedom, gotten burned, and the OEM's have moved on to the next chip. I only really want one card that works well and includes source and is obtainable in the ballpark of <motherboard cost> * 3, so if this card is it, great.
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