Glendon Gross wrote: > That's right, guys! This is FreeBSD after all... so Mr. Lambert is > entitled to charge 10K for that bugfix code if he wants. In fact he is > "Free" to do so. But it's a little pricy for me, although perhaps not for > AMD if it means they can fix their cache-paging problems!
It cost me two weeks to figure out, and both Intel and AMD wanted to charge me $$$ to file a problem report. I once fixed a Borland library problem which was pretty serious: it would effect all programs that did string manipulation, and linked the standard library, instead of using the compiler generated inlines. They wanted to charge me to file a bug report, too, so I demanded that they agree to send me a T-shirt before I would tell them the fix. As far as I know, they still have the bug. Microsoft also charged me to report a bug in the removable media driver in Windows 95/98 (you can't safely page to it because it fails to propagate some writes it's supposed to propagate, so you can'tt safely install Windows on a JAZ or Syquest cartridge, because paging fails). I made them admit the problem, and they credited the incident report after they admitted it was their issue, but it still started my 90 day support clock, so that it wasn't there when I needed it, later. Since it's not a FreeBSD problem, you'll forgive me if I find it funny that Linux and Windows disables the PSE to work around some problems. It's not that hard to understand or work around, if you know where to look, and knowing where to look is what will cost them. The *other* AMD problem, with AGP and 4K and 4M pages that point to the same memory could arguably be a chipset or a software problem (depending on whether or not the chipset vendor has documented the behaviour before people were let loose to write the software -- errata: the difference between a software problem and a software workaround to a hardware problem). It's already documented how to work around that one; I'm sure a fix is pending for Linux, and Windows will probably leave PSE off until they can figure out a way to update everyone. -- Terry To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message
