On Mon, Aug 11, 2008 at 10:21:00PM +0200, Lukas Razik wrote: > Hello Jeremy, Sevan and Pyun! > > Thanks for your fast answers! > I'm happy to see that it could work with the newest 7.0-STABLE tree because I > don't want to buy a new NIC which works with FreeBSD.
Be aware that Realtek NICs have a history of being incredibly buggy and having very odd engineering design flaws. I go to great lengths to avoid them on motherboards; I agree an OS should work with it, but based on the pain I've seen Yong-Hyeon (driver maintainer) go through when it comes to hardware revisions or general oddities, I often cringe at the idea of using a Realtek NIC in any environment I have control over. (I've blogged about how Realtek more or less dominates the consumer market with their NIC/PHYs, which is quite scary considering the bugs even in their Windows drivers.) I am very, very thankful we have an active rl(4) and re(4) driver maintainer, though. :-) > I use FreeBSD for 90% > (for some years now) and therefore I also bought a 3ware 8006-2LP Hardware- > RAID controller and will buy a second HighPoint 3120 HW-RAID controller > (which > is less expensive) because I had bad experiences with the Fake- (or > Pseudo-)RAID controllers like the "normal" onboard controllers and others > (Promise FastTrak 4310 etc.). I have a tendency to like Intel (and occasionally nVidia, but highly prefer Intel) ICH controllers simply because Intel has fantastic product errata, and the ICH controllers have performed quite well over the years. They're also used on server hardware (read: Supermicro). But in this day and age, one of the best SATA controllers for FreeBSD is an Areca controller. They're somewhat expensive (comparatively), but the performance is apparently stunning, combined with decent FreeBSD drivers that utilise CAM and da(4) (yes, despite the disks being SATA). Every time people mention them on the lists, the response is the same: amazing performance, and really good driver + administrative support (e.g. software administrative utilities). I do wish Areca made a less expensive controller with less features, intended for "tech-savvy" consumer use, in the US$125 or less price range. > Now I also have troubles with FreeBSD and the ICH9R SATA-controller > and it's RAID functionality. I'm not surprised. FreeBSD's Intel MatrixRAID support is very dangerous, I would not recommend using it if your data matters. There are a few PRs which contain patches that address some of the concerns, but out-of-the-box, I'd recommend avoiding Intel MatrixRAID on FreeBSD. > So I don't want to pay more money for special hardware which works with > FreBSD... > > BTW: > Where can I read changes to the drivers (like this one) to be up to date? > Is FreeBSD's CVS Repository the only ressource? > > It seems as if there's no new snapshot for the amd64 arch: > ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/snapshots/200808/ As far as I know, CVS is the only place you'll get explanations. It would be a daunting task to document every little change to snapshots. The ISO/CD snapshots are automatically generated, AFAIK. -- | Jeremy Chadwick jdc at parodius.com | | Parodius Networking http://www.parodius.com/ | | UNIX Systems Administrator Mountain View, CA, USA | | Making life hard for others since 1977. PGP: 4BD6C0CB | _______________________________________________ freebsd-hardware@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hardware To unsubscribe, send any mail to "[EMAIL PROTECTED]"
