Here's additional place where FreeBSD has lack of support: USB based printers.
Here's a citation from the FreeBSD handbook (page no. 251): > USB interfaces, named for the Universal Serial Bus, can run at even faster > speeds than parallel or RS-232 serial interfaces. Cables are simple and > cheap. USB is superior to RS-232 Serial and to Parallel for printing, but it > is not as well supported under UNIX systems. A way to avoid this problem is > to purchase a printer that has both a USB interface and a Parallel interface, > as many printers do. > >> Hi, >> >> The main issue is this: I really don't like the USB driver stuff in the >> kernel. >> >> When I last checked, there was no clean example of a wifi or ethernet >> driver which handles all of the odd corner cases of things correctly. >> So you'd end up with things like taskqueues still running whilst the >> NIC had been pulled out, all sleeping on a wakeup that'll never come, >> or the ioctl path not really being locked the right way with the rest >> of the USB driver. >> >> I started tinkering with a driver for the AR9170, but I still couldn't >> get the command handling side of things right. It's tricky because USB >> is effectively a network protocol, but all the drivers are written >> assuming register accesses are synchronous. So you end up having to >> craft some kind of command structure that handles sleeping for >> commands that it expects a response on from another USB endpoint (eg >> register reads), but not sleeping for commands that are asynchronous. >> I gave up because it became "non-fun." >> >> So yeah. Almost all of the work is done in the atheros driver side of >> things. Heck, the AR9271 bits for the HAL are likely just an evenings >> worth of work for me. I just don't want to deal with the USB side of >> it. >> >> I'm not being paid to do any of the wireless stuff in FreeBSD, so it >> has to clear the "is it fun" threshold. >> >> >> -a _______________________________________________ [email protected] mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-wireless To unsubscribe, send any mail to "[email protected]"
