On Sat, November 21, 2009 20:25, Al Hopper wrote: >> And the last silly question. It seems to me that you'd have many, many >> adopters if there was a real answer to what the HCL tries to be and >> isn't - an answer to "if I buy this stuff, do I have a prayer of making >> it work, or is there a subtle gotcha that's going to waste my time and >> money?" We used to solve that with reference designs. They don't have to >> be perfect, they don't have to be optimal, but they should be practical >> and they should be modestly predictable given moderate skill in the art. > > Agreed - the HCL has not proved to be as useful, in practice, as most > users would like. It's a difficult task - but the typical OpenSolaris > builder is unwilling to put the effort in to contribute to the HCL. > Current OpenSolaris releases work well enough and support enough > current hardware that the risk of something mainstream *not* working > is pretty slim. Of course its very inconvenient to install an OS and > then find that it did'nt come with a driver for the onboard NIC, > without the NIC, you can't get and install the required driver > conveniently.
The problem of course is how quickly the hardware world is still moving. Is there enough information available from system configuration utilities to make an automatic HCL (or unofficial HCL competitor) feasible? Someone could write an application people could run which would report their opinion on how well it works, plus the self-reported identity of all key components? (It could report uptime, too, as one very small objective rating of stability.) -- David Dyer-Bennet, d...@dd-b.net; http://dd-b.net/ Snapshots: http://dd-b.net/dd-b/SnapshotAlbum/data/ Photos: http://dd-b.net/photography/gallery/ Dragaera: http://dragaera.info _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
