Keith M Wesolowski wrote: > On Tue, Dec 18, 2007 at 11:13:25PM -0500, Richard Lowe wrote: > >> I'm sure the point's being raised to you in private will be raised to >> the ARC and the C-Team (out of the fear of precise duplication), and >> be argued on their technical merit. > > Duplication is certainly bad. I was thinking the team should really > go engage with the other driver's Project Team first, but I couldn't > find them in the project directory[0]. Did the Device Drivers Group > create this Project and we just failed to set it up? > > [0] http://www.opensolaris.org/os/projects/ >
The problem is that 'drivers from third parties' is a very informal, very touch-and-go, million-times-harder-to-predict process than 'drivers from Sun' (or apparently 'drivers from the OSS community'). Many companies are just not very forthcoming about their progress, and even when they are, there are legal forests that apparently simply cannot be bypassed or traversed quickly. that doesn't make it right, and it would also be awesome if "two drivers for the same device" was an easier thing to handle in Solaris, but the fact is, we've been burned in the past by "let's just do this driver now, and then later replace it with a better one"...so there's a strong desire to do the complete driver first. The stumbling block is always upgrade, because you need to translate from the old physical paths to the new physical paths, and need to dig around in all the places on the disk that have the old paths stored, and sadly, that's even beyond some of the Solaris places (rumor has it, for instance, that physical paths are stored inside some third-party disk management or third-party database configurations). ...which still doesn't make it right. I'm just trying to provide some alternative perspective, and I don't know any details of the LSI situation directly, so I don't know what's dominating here. It's probably best to try to work this internally to Sun, however, since I'm assuming, and I'll bet correctly, that the details of the relationship are not things that LSI/Sun want to be public. David, I'm thrilled that your work is done, and I wish there were an easier answer that we could all support without reservation. Maybe if we can make the argument that "on that halcyon day, when LSI provides the complete solution, upgrade will magically work correctly without extra effort", it would help, but I'm afraid that's technically far-fetched. _______________________________________________ driver-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/driver-discuss
