Re: if_fxp - the real point
I am still using a number of these boards in our test environment every day. The fxp driver always complains but it hasn't stopped the nic from working yet. I simply ignore the messages... Bob On Fri, Mar 09, 2001 at 10:23:21AM -0800, Mike Smith wrote: What board is this? If this is the board I think it is, it's a Supermicro P6DLE dual Slot-1 motherboard with an integrated Intel 82559 (no external PHY). (I had this board for some time before I gave it to David, it was originally donated to FTL by Bob Willcox.) Sam - Original Message - From: "David O'Brien" [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: "Alex Zepeda" [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Friday, March 09, 2001 4:42 AM Subject: Re: if_fxp - the real point On Thu, Mar 08, 2001 at 06:13:07PM -0800, Alex Zepeda wrote: However, there *ARE* some of us who aren't intimate with your fxp problems. The problem does exist. I have a board that the `fxp' driver splits this out for: fxp0: warning: unsupported PHY, type = 17, addr = 2 fxp1: warning: unsupported PHY, type = 17, addr = 2 To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message -- ... every activity meets with opposition, everyone who acts has his rivals and unfortunately opponents also. But not because people want to be opponents, rather because the tasks and relationships force people to take different points of view. [Dr. Fritz Todt] V I C T O R Y N O T V E N G E A N C E To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message -- Bob Willcox The reason we come up with new versions is not to [EMAIL PROTECTED]fix bugs. It's absolutely not. Austin, TX -- Bill Gates To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: if_fxp - the real point
At 06:38 PM 03/30/2001, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Dennis writes: . My competitors probably sell twice as many boards as I do and I'll bet that I make more profit than they do. Selling more is not necessarily good. Selling more can be very bad. WHO you sell to and HOW MUCH they pay are more important. Its all about MARGIN. And you lose margin when everyone has the same information. Gold worlds! I think me as customer so I know, that my and my family life is as good as all margins are low. So I do not buy Intel's products many years and newer buy M$ - no matter how good (of bad) M$ products are. By the way, I manage a lot of purchasing (I am a consultant). And I am not alone. Several grains of sand dont make a beach. Im sure you dont drive a mercedes either, but Im sure they are doing ok without y ou. A vendor does not have to sell their product to every person in the world using that type of product to be successful. In fact M$ got in a bit of trouble trying to do so. Im not sure why you fellows dont get that. DB To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: if_fxp - the real point
At 06:38 PM 03/30/2001, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Dennis writes: . My competitors probably sell twice as many boards as I do and I'll bet that I make more profit than they do. Selling more is not necessarily good. Selling more can be very bad. WHO you sell to and HOW MUCH they pay are more important. Its all about MARGIN. And you lose margin when everyone has the same information. Gold worlds! I think me as customer so I know, that my and my family life is as good as all margins are low. So I do not buy Intel's products many years and newer buy M$ - no matter how good (of bad) M$ products are. By the way, I manage a lot of purchasing (I am a consultant). And I am not alone. What do you Russians make? Like $90. a month? Now theres a market worth going after :-) Dennis To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: if_fxp - the real point
On Thu, Mar 29, 2001 at 09:40:05PM -0500, Dennis wrote: Im sure that Intel is really sweating over your decision. I think they should. When people realise they are buying into something tainted and undisclosed only open to an 'elite' crowd (like dennis) then people will look elsewhere. There is something called responsibility and honor also in the business world. The consumer ignorance that has exceeded ueber-extremes is coming to an abrupt halt as people are empowering themselves with information on what exactly it is that they are buying into. And.. in the end that's only fair. Using yourself as an example was brilliant. YOU are exactly the kind of engineer/company that I am talking about. YOU will release your design specs so the FreeBSD community will get to use your hardware instead of intels. Wooopee do. All the power to him, at least here is someone that doesn't hide behind some futile business model of hiding the scam behind closed doors. This way of doing things at least provides a product not for the sake of making more money than the competition but raising the worlds trek to better engineering and new limits. You, my friend, are a joke. Im sorry (other list members)...do you have any You should be more sorry. Whether open or closed discussion you leash out at people putting them down and being plain insulting! Please do yourself a favour and drop the ego, as there is people out there than can put you down and make you feel very miserable and alone in the end. Be fair and others will be fair to you. clue how much money intel makes, and how insignificant your (wrong) opinion is to them? and, while I dont have the actual numbers, I'll bet that intel There is a lot more worth in being human and caring about all the things that money can't provide. Money in extremes (either very poor or very rich) makes people very unhappy and you can see this if you'd be open to it. and 3com have well over 50% of the linux/BSD free software market without releasing their docs. Why? because they make good, cheap boards that are available from many sources worldwide. do you want to take that away from BSD users by "boycotting" their hardware? why cant this thread just die? ditto. give it a rest. -- - - Peter Philipp [EMAIL PROTECTED] Daemonium To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: if_fxp - the real point
At 10:40 AM 03/30/2001, you wrote: On Thu, Mar 29, 2001 at 09:40:05PM -0500, Dennis wrote: Im sure that Intel is really sweating over your decision. I think they should. When people realise they are buying into something tainted and undisclosed only open to an 'elite' crowd (like dennis) then people will look elsewhere. Its only "tainted" in the minds of "source weenies". Your thinking is not mainstream. Your implication that a company with teams of marketing and legal gurus is just so naive about the freebsd market that they dont "get it" is comical. I know you dont want to hear this, but "hackers" are generally undesirable customers. They complain a lot, think they know everything, refuse to read documentation (mainly because they are used to not having any)...so "losing" their business isnt that unprofitable. do you think that the MSCE at some big company that buys our FreeBSD-based firewall/bandwidth manager complains daily about there being no GUI support for divert functions? Or that it doesnt have the latest version of ssh? Nope. They are just happy that they got what the paid for, a nice firewall that controls their bandwidth. And guess what? They also dont whine about not getting discounts because they are an "isp" or a "reseller" or a "good guy". They pay the same price and dont complain. Thats a model customer. Im 100% sure that there arent discussions in the board rooms at General Motors about using Servers with realtek ethernet controllers because intel requires an NDA for disclosure of their eepro100. Intel DOES release the info, they just dont want YOU to release it. You can write a driver, and you can sell it, you just cant give away the info. That serves the mainstream community. And thats where the money is. If you stop writing drivers for FreeBSD for intel products, guess what? Someone else will write one and make a lot of money off of it. So you are just going to create opportunities for the very people you hate, the capitalists. Dennis To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: if_fxp - the real point
In message [EMAIL PROTECTED], Dennis writes: [snip] Dennis, everything you're saying sounds exactly like the people who were saying, five or ten years ago, that Linux would *never* make *any* difference, because Microsoft had already won. If there is a measurable population of people to whom open specs are important, open specs are a competitive advantage. Over time, they are likely to win if all else is equal... and in the long run, all else *is* equal. Is General Motors worried about using a card for which the drivers require an NDA? No. Is Home Depot, who are running a lot of boxes on Linux, more likely to standardize on a few thousand cards that their programmers assure them are "safer for us"? Yes. The pressure need not be overwhelming to be real. Over time, yes, I expect to see more vendors release hardware specs, because failure to do so can cost them *at least some* sales. The number of sales seems to be steadily going up. It can be very small today and still be a big deal in five years. -s To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: if_fxp - the real point
At 12:49 PM 03/30/2001, Peter Seebach wrote: In message [EMAIL PROTECTED], Dennis writes: [snip] Dennis, everything you're saying sounds exactly like the people who were saying, five or ten years ago, that Linux would *never* make *any* difference, because Microsoft had already won. Microsoft has won in the markets that existed at the time. Unix is more suitable for internet services, so it has a sizable chunk of the internet market. BSDi failed miserably against MS with an arguably better product in the server market. Source availability didnt help much. And lets face it. If MS had a good product, they would have a much larger market share and linux would be a non-issue. MS just makes shitty stuff. Its not about "open source". its about how well it works. I've said it 1000 times but none of the source weenies want to hear it. Linux started to make headway when it started to work well. The fact that its cheap helps too, with or without source. If there is a measurable population of people to whom open specs are important, open specs are a competitive advantage. Over time, they are likely to win if all else is equal... and in the long run, all else *is* equal. Open specs are a competitive disadvantage, because all players are equal. NetBSD will never be much better than FreeBSD (or vice-versa) because they keep stealing each others ideas and code. Those that sign an NDA have an advantage of those that dont, that the whole point. Is General Motors worried about using a card for which the drivers require an NDA? No. Is Home Depot, who are running a lot of boxes on Linux, more likely to standardize on a few thousand cards that their programmers assure them are "safer for us"? Yes. I'll bet you $.50 they use intel or 3com cards. The pressure need not be overwhelming to be real. Over time, yes, I expect to see more vendors release hardware specs, because failure to do so can cost them *at least some* sales. The number of sales seems to be steadily going up. It can be very small today and still be a big deal in five years. "some" sales dont matter. You dont understand the trade-offs, which often are negative. My competitors probably sell twice as many boards as I do and I'll bet that I make more profit than they do. Selling more is not necessarily good. Selling more can be very bad. WHO you sell to and HOW MUCH they pay are more important. Its all about MARGIN. And you lose margin when everyone has the same information. Dennis To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: if_fxp - the real point
In message [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED] m writes: And lets face it. If MS had a good product, they would have a much larger market share and linux would be a non-issue. MS just makes shitty stuff. Its not about "open source". Directly, it isn't. Indirectly, it is. its about how well it works. Although that comes from the software being open source. If it's open source and broken enough to affect me or my employer, I can and will fix it, and send patches back to the maintainers. If it's not, the higher the hurdles are the more likely I/we will spend time finding a workarround or switching products instead. Regardless of how good your test team and tools are, there are going to cases you don't test for, and bugs are going to escape into the field. With more competant people in the field that have source you're more likely to have the bug manifest in a situation where someone can and will do something about it. Open source has the potential to make software more stable than its closed counterparts, and often does in practice. By virtue of having more people able to make changes, open source also increases your chances of someone being able to justify the expense (time, opportunity cost from not applying talent elsewhere, money, etc) to add a feature. important, open specs are a competitive advantage. Over time, they are likely to win if all else is equal... and in the long run, all else *is* equal. Open specs are a competitive disadvantage, because all players are equal. It depends entirely on the circumstances. With small niche markets, you're much more likely to run into situations where open specs can make a huge difference in the number of sales you make. Look at what happened to the PC multiport serial board market. OTOH, with millions of sales for Wintel PCs, sales increases in the thousands of units aren't going to make a difference in your bottom line. If you're selling black boxes, it may not matter. Or your customers may find it reasuring that if you go belly up or discontinue the product they can still buy support from some one else. -- a href="http://www.poohsticks.org/drew/"Home Page/a For those who do, no explanation is necessary. For those who don't, no explanation is possible. To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: if_fxp - the real point
At 02:50 PM 03/30/2001, Drew Eckhardt wrote: In message [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED] m writes: And lets face it. If MS had a good product, they would have a much larger market share and linux would be a non-issue. MS just makes shitty stuff. Its not about "open source". Directly, it isn't. Indirectly, it is. its about how well it works. Although that comes from the software being open source. If it's open source and broken enough to affect me or my employer, This is a lot like trying to convince a jew that theres nothing wrong with cheeseburgers. Open source has its place, but its not going to take over the world. Deal with it. FreeBSD is not even better than Windows out of the box, because you need an experienced unix person to set up the box. It doesnt matter if its better, because you can't FIND experienced unix people. The economics of open source will not allow it to dominate, because there arent enough good programmers to make it work. Im arguing with a guy from "poohsticks.org". What am i thinking? lol db To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: if_fxp - the real point
Dennis writes: . My competitors probably sell twice as many boards as I do and I'll bet that I make more profit than they do. Selling more is not necessarily good. Selling more can be very bad. WHO you sell to and HOW MUCH they pay are more important. Its all about MARGIN. And you lose margin when everyone has the same information. Gold worlds! I think me as customer so I know, that my and my family life is as good as all margins are low. So I do not buy Intel's products many years and newer buy M$ - no matter how good (of bad) M$ products are. By the way, I manage a lot of purchasing (I am a consultant). And I am not alone. -- @BABOLO http://links.ru/ To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: if_fxp - the real point
On Wed, 28 Mar 2001, Dennis wrote: At 04:22 PM 03/28/2001, Chistopher S. Weimann wrote: On Wed, Mar 14, 2001 at 12:33:21PM -0500, Dennis wrote: Your logic is backwards. You think that rewarding mediocre companies will scare good companies into wanting a piece of the pie. The only thing that it will do is consume these companies so that the good companies can have a larger share of the more profitable sun/NT market, and convince them that they want no part of the "free" market if they have to compete with cut-rate hardware from hungry companies. Ok, let me get this Free Market thing straight. Not buying from a good company that provides a useful product and instead buying from a bad company that doesn't provide a useful product will make things better. That seems to be what you are saying dennis. No, I said just the opposite. This was in response to someone suggesting that we boycott companies like Intel for not providing full disclosure on their boards, and reward companies that do by touting their products. So I said that promoting lesser products because they are "cooperative" will make good hardware less available to the freebsd community, which might make some little people feel powerful but it wont serve the user base, which I assume is the goal. You seem to keep inferring that all vendors who disclose full programming information somehow have "lesser" hardware. Sure, there is plenty of crap out there that happens to have full programming information for it. There is also lots of good stuff that has full programming information. The Alteon Tigon and Tigon 2 are perfect examples (and very relevant to this discussion, since it seems to have started over the Intel Gigabit Ethernet adapters), and Alteon seems to have disclosed more than enough information to allow Bill Paul to write an extremely good driver. They actually went so far as to release the _firmware_ code for the board (how many vendors do you know of who do THAT?) so that Bill could tweak it as he saw fit, rather than having to use "black-box" firmware like most other vendors supply. This, to me, actually makes the Alteon Tigon Gigabit Ethernet chipsets a far, far BETTER product than the Intel Gigabit Ethernet chipsets. Intel in this case is the "lesser" hardware vendor which also happens to be a pain in the ass when it comes to getting programming information. -- Chris Dillon - [EMAIL PROTECTED] - [EMAIL PROTECTED] FreeBSD: The fastest and most stable server OS on the planet. For IA32 and Alpha architectures. IA64, PPC, and ARM under development. http://www.freebsd.org To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: if_fxp - the real point
At 11:01 AM 03/29/2001, you wrote: On Wed, 28 Mar 2001, Dennis wrote: At 04:22 PM 03/28/2001, Chistopher S. Weimann wrote: On Wed, Mar 14, 2001 at 12:33:21PM -0500, Dennis wrote: Your logic is backwards. You think that rewarding mediocre companies will scare good companies into wanting a piece of the pie. The only thing that it will do is consume these companies so that the good companies can have a larger share of the more profitable sun/NT market, and convince them that they want no part of the "free" market if they have to compete with cut-rate hardware from hungry companies. Ok, let me get this Free Market thing straight. Not buying from a good company that provides a useful product and instead buying from a bad company that doesn't provide a useful product will make things better. That seems to be what you are saying dennis. No, I said just the opposite. This was in response to someone suggesting that we boycott companies like Intel for not providing full disclosure on their boards, and reward companies that do by touting their products. So I said that promoting lesser products because they are "cooperative" will make good hardware less available to the freebsd community, which might make some little people feel powerful but it wont serve the user base, which I assume is the goal. You seem to keep inferring that all vendors who disclose full programming information somehow have "lesser" hardware. [other trivial stuff snipped] I think that boycotting Intel and 3Com says enough to dispute your argument. The possible fact that some "good hardware" is disclosed doesnt make for good counterpoint. Generally, companies that "just crank out hardware" disclose their hardware specs., and releasing source is a last ditch effort when a company finds its software not good enough to sell. Value added vendors dont release such things, and value-added vendors tend to be the more dominant vendors. DB To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: if_fxp - the real point
Sorry everybody, I have to express my opinion now. Dennis, it seems like that you keep repeating yourself here And you keep being wrong. As a hardware designer myself, I can assure you that there is no connection between hardware quality and level of documentation. And having fought with Intel getting documentation myself on other parts, I have long time ago decided to only use Intel parts if I really have to, just like more and more engineers decides. Most other vendors, incl the best ones, don't have any problem releasing full documentation. Intel just don't get it, they had had that arrogant attitude for years, and now that they don't own the PC market anymore, they're going to pay for it. Regards, Soren And btw, this discussion really should be taken somewhere else, so don't expect any follow ups from me here. Dennis wrote: I think that boycotting Intel and 3Com says enough to dispute your argument. The possible fact that some "good hardware" is disclosed doesnt make for good counterpoint. Generally, companies that "just crank out hardware" disclose their hardware specs., and releasing source is a last ditch effort when a company finds its software not good enough to sell. Value added vendors dont release such things, and value-added vendors tend to be the more dominant vendors. DB To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: if_fxp - the real point
At 07:20 PM 03/29/2001, Soren Kristensen wrote: Sorry everybody, I have to express my opinion now. Dennis, it seems like that you keep repeating yourself here And you keep being wrong. As a hardware designer myself, I can assure you that there is no connection between hardware quality and level of documentation. And having fought with Intel getting documentation myself on other parts, I have long time ago decided to only use Intel parts if I really have to, just like more and more engineers decides. Im sure that Intel is really sweating over your decision. Using yourself as an example was brilliant. YOU are exactly the kind of engineer/company that I am talking about. YOU will release your design specs so the FreeBSD community will get to use your hardware instead of intels. Wooopee do. Most other vendors, incl the best ones, don't have any problem releasing full documentation. 3com never has, nor has intel,and they generally are considered top vendors. Still zero valid points. Dlink and realtek are clone vendors, as are kingston and most others. The 2 market leaders dont release their docs. Intel just don't get it, they had had that arrogant attitude for years, and now that they don't own the PC market anymore, they're going to pay for it. You, my friend, are a joke. Im sorry (other list members)...do you have any clue how much money intel makes, and how insignificant your (wrong) opinion is to them? and, while I dont have the actual numbers, I'll bet that intel and 3com have well over 50% of the linux/BSD free software market without releasing their docs. Why? because they make good, cheap boards that are available from many sources worldwide. do you want to take that away from BSD users by "boycotting" their hardware? why cant this thread just die? db To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: if_fxp - the real point
On Thu, Mar 29, 2001 at 09:40:05PM -0500, Dennis wrote: 3com never has, Uh, how do you think Bill Paul wrote the xl driver? To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: if_fxp - the real point
On Wed, Mar 14, 2001 at 12:33:21PM -0500, Dennis wrote: Your logic is backwards. You think that rewarding mediocre companies will scare good companies into wanting a piece of the pie. The only thing that it will do is consume these companies so that the good companies can have a larger share of the more profitable sun/NT market, and convince them that they want no part of the "free" market if they have to compete with cut-rate hardware from hungry companies. Ok, let me get this Free Market thing straight. Not buying from a good company that provides a useful product and instead buying from a bad company that doesn't provide a useful product will make things better. That seems to be what you are saying dennis. Or did I misunderstand? -- Christopher Weimann SysAdmin 400 Higgins Ave Wall Internet LLC.Brielle NJ, 08730 732-223-1777 To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: if_fxp - the real point
At 04:22 PM 03/28/2001, Chistopher S. Weimann wrote: On Wed, Mar 14, 2001 at 12:33:21PM -0500, Dennis wrote: Your logic is backwards. You think that rewarding mediocre companies will scare good companies into wanting a piece of the pie. The only thing that it will do is consume these companies so that the good companies can have a larger share of the more profitable sun/NT market, and convince them that they want no part of the "free" market if they have to compete with cut-rate hardware from hungry companies. Ok, let me get this Free Market thing straight. Not buying from a good company that provides a useful product and instead buying from a bad company that doesn't provide a useful product will make things better. That seems to be what you are saying dennis. No, I said just the opposite. This was in response to someone suggesting that we boycott companies like Intel for not providing full disclosure on their boards, and reward companies that do by touting their products. So I said that promoting lesser products because they are "cooperative" will make good hardware less available to the freebsd community, which might make some little people feel powerful but it wont serve the user base, which I assume is the goal. Get it? Dennis To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: if_fxp - the real point
-On [20010310 01:00], Lyndon Nerenberg ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: Perhaps a first step towards leaning on the vendors for documentation is to publically declare our support for those vendors who *do* release documentation under reasonable terms. One way to do this is to acknowledge those vendors in the hardware section of the handbook, and encourage people to support them by buying thier products. That's what Soeren and me did. HighPoint was very forthcoming with documentation and as part of that synergy they put the FreeBSD Hardware logo on their frontpage http://www.highpoint-tech.com and us mentioning it on our webpages as well as being a primary recommendation over other vendors back when we got little information out of other vendors. -- Jeroen Ruigrok van der Werven/Asmodai .oUo. asmodai@[wxs.nl|freebsd.org] Documentation nutter/C-rated Coder BSD: Technical excellence at its best D78D D0AD 244D 1D12 C9CA 7152 035C 1138 546A B867 What is history but a fable agreed 'pon? To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: if_fxp - the real point
At 06:35 AM 03/14/2001, Jeroen Ruigrok/Asmodai wrote: -On [20010310 01:00], Lyndon Nerenberg ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: Perhaps a first step towards leaning on the vendors for documentation is to publically declare our support for those vendors who *do* release documentation under reasonable terms. One way to do this is to acknowledge those vendors in the hardware section of the handbook, and encourage people to support them by buying thier products. Typically companies that are quick to release docs are the weaker companies, because they need sales or dont have a clear target market. Plus the best technologies are usually proprietary at least in the beginning of their deployment. So your strategy will guarantee alignment with many mediocre products and few of the best, which doesnt seem to be in the best interests of anyone. Telling people that they cant use Intel or 3com cards will more likely drive them to other OSes then hurt either of the fore mentioned companies. A better strategy would be to welcome ALL vendors AND binary distributions (who may release source under NDA if they chose) so that the best products could be available for FreeBSD without the adversity of the "geek-revolution" that you propose. That's what Soeren and me did. HighPoint was very forthcoming with documentation and as part of that synergy they put the FreeBSD Hardware logo on their frontpage http://www.highpoint-tech.com and us mentioning it on our webpages as well as being a primary recommendation over other vendors back when we got little information out of other vendors. I'm sure that High-point's competitors are shivering in their boots over this powerful alliance. DB Emerging Technologies, Inc. - http://www.etinc.com ISA and PCI T1/T3/V35/HSSI Cards for FreeBSD and LINUX Multiport T1 and HSSI/T3 UNIX-based Routers Bandwidth Management Standalone Systems Bandwidth Management software for LINUX and FreeBSD To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: if_fxp - the real point
* Dennis [EMAIL PROTECTED] [010314 08:14] wrote: A better strategy would be to welcome ALL vendors AND binary distributions (who may release source under NDA if they chose) so that the best products could be available for FreeBSD without the adversity of the "geek-revolution" that you propose. I don't know about that: how many times does windows crash because of poorly written drivers rather than flaws in the core OS? (*) how many hardware vendors say "sure dude, just buy _any_ disk and stick it in my SAN box, we'll still support you!" (*) win9x has a "feature" they expect thier driver coders to be brain dead enough to exhaust the kernel stack (either that or the driver arch demands this), they have a guard page on the stack that catches overruns and performs a "fixup" do a search on "MinSP" (maybe plural) to see what I mean. -- -Alfred Perlstein - [[EMAIL PROTECTED]|[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Daemon News Magazine in your snail-mail! http://magazine.daemonnews.org/ To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: if_fxp - the real point
At 11:32 AM 03/14/2001, you wrote: Dennis wrote: At 06:35 AM 03/14/2001, Jeroen Ruigrok/Asmodai wrote: -On [20010310 01:00], Lyndon Nerenberg ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: Perhaps a first step towards leaning on the vendors for documentation is to publically declare our support for those vendors who *do* release documentation under reasonable terms. One way to do this is to acknowledge those vendors in the hardware section of the handbook, and encourage people to support them by buying thier products. Typically companies that are quick to release docs are the weaker companies, because they need sales or dont have a clear target market. Plus the best technologies are usually proprietary at least in the beginning of their deployment. So your strategy will guarantee alignment with many mediocre products and few of the best, which doesnt seem to be in the best interests of anyone. Telling people that they cant use Intel or 3com cards will more likely drive them to other OSes then hurt either of the fore mentioned companies. A better strategy would be to welcome ALL vendors AND binary distributions (who may release source under NDA if they chose) so that the best products could be available for FreeBSD without the adversity of the "geek-revolution" that you propose. I think you underestimate the number of faceless servers thoughout the world running FreeBSD or Linux. The jobs they do aren't glamourous, but they have to be done (cheap), so they don't get the front page accolades that Sun UE10ks get, but they do get used. My point is that it will have no impact, so you will only hurt the FreeBSD community. You cant strong-arm companies into making their intellectual properly rights publicly available. its a losing argument. That's what Soeren and me did. HighPoint was very forthcoming with documentation and as part of that synergy they put the FreeBSD Hardware logo on their frontpage http://www.highpoint-tech.com and us mentioning it on our webpages as well as being a primary recommendation over other vendors back when we got little information out of other vendors. I'm sure that High-point's competitors are shivering in their boots over this powerful alliance. Probably not, but they might wonder why High-points sales are stronger than they should be, and why there is so much positive material about High-point cards on the web (while their own cards are barely mentioned). People who want to get work done don't want to mess with a company that tries to stop them (by not releasing specs or drivers for the OS you're using) and will instead go with the open-minded competetor. selling to geeks is not most companies marketing strategy. What you fail to understand is the negative impact on sales when some taiwanese company clones the hardware and you effectively end up cannibalizing your own business with your efforts. Your also just as likely to get negative press because the guy that writes the driver for your hardware does a lousy job, and the resulting driver sucks and people then think your hardware sucks because most geeks can't separate the hardware from the driver. Your logic is backwards. You think that rewarding mediocre companies will scare good companies into wanting a piece of the pie. The only thing that it will do is consume these companies so that the good companies can have a larger share of the more profitable sun/NT market, and convince them that they want no part of the "free" market if they have to compete with cut-rate hardware from hungry companies. Driving away companies with good products because you dont like their policies is counterproductive. the only reason people use windows is because of their relationships with vendors who sell products that people want. its not about the OS, its about what you can do with it. dennis To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: if_fxp - the real point
* Dennis [EMAIL PROTECTED] [010314 09:21] wrote: At 12:09 PM 03/14/2001, Alfred Perlstein wrote: * Dennis [EMAIL PROTECTED] [010314 08:14] wrote: A better strategy would be to welcome ALL vendors AND binary distributions (who may release source under NDA if they chose) so that the best products could be available for FreeBSD without the adversity of the "geek-revolution" that you propose. I don't know about that: how many times does windows crash because of poorly written drivers rather than flaws in the core OS? (*) Im not sure of what the difference is. There are many poorly written drivers in FreeBSD and linux also. The fact that you have source may be soothing, but it doesnt help the 99% of people that cant fix it themselves. At least we can point at the driver and call it a honking bunch of poo rather than allowing the blame to hit the core OS. Honestly, I'd love to see vendors able to work out shipping drivers for FreeBSD, even in binary form, it would make users happy. I would just be pretty hard pressed to use them though. :) -- -Alfred Perlstein - [[EMAIL PROTECTED]|[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Daemon News Magazine in your snail-mail! http://magazine.daemonnews.org/ To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: if_fxp - the real point
You cant strong-arm companies into making their intellectual properly rights publicly available. its a losing argument. Strange, in that it worked for a number of video-card vendors when XFree86 either dropped support and/or never supported the card in question. Nate To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: if_fxp - the real point
On Wed, Mar 14, 2001 at 11:37:34AM -0800, Alfred Perlstein wrote: ALL the time. Microsoft has given the UC-Davis security and formal verification lab a multi-year grant to look at this problem. (the approach being researched is "model checking") How does one get the forms for these sort of grants? :) Write white paper, submit to M$. Or network at conference, have M$ friend tell you a proposal would be meet open arms. The typical University/research way of getting [commercial] grants. -- -- David ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) GNU is Not Unix / Linux Is Not UniX To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: if_fxp - the real point
At 02:31 PM 03/14/2001, Jeroen Ruigrok/Asmodai wrote: -On [20010314 17:38], Dennis ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: At 06:35 AM 03/14/2001, Jeroen Ruigrok/Asmodai wrote: That's what Soeren and me did. HighPoint was very forthcoming with documentation and as part of that synergy they put the FreeBSD Hardware logo on their frontpage http://www.highpoint-tech.com and us mentioning it on our webpages as well as being a primary recommendation over other vendors back when we got little information out of other vendors. I'm sure that High-point's competitors are shivering in their boots over this powerful alliance. Well Dennis, I congratulate you. Be assured that with this attitude you just displayed you made me decide never to recommend ET Inc., for any of my present and future projects. Clearly you dont get it. Its like teaching a fish to fly. LOL To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: if_fxp - the real point
At 01:47 PM 03/14/2001, you wrote: On Wed, Mar 14, 2001 at 09:09:15AM -0800, Alfred Perlstein wrote: how many times does windows crash because of poorly written drivers rather than flaws in the core OS? (*) ALL the time. Microsoft has given the UC-Davis security and formal verification lab a multi-year grant to look at this problem. (the approach being researched is "model checking") Why would they need to do that? Every time you load a program it updates the libraries, breaking older programs. Its a philosophical problem. You dont need a grant to figure it out. To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: if_fxp - the real point
At 02:31 PM 03/14/2001, Jeroen Ruigrok/Asmodai wrote: -On [20010314 17:38], Dennis ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: At 06:35 AM 03/14/2001, Jeroen Ruigrok/Asmodai wrote: That's what Soeren and me did. HighPoint was very forthcoming with documentation and as part of that synergy they put the FreeBSD Hardware logo on their frontpage http://www.highpoint-tech.com and us mentioning it on our webpages as well as being a primary recommendation over other vendors back when we got little information out of other vendors. I'm sure that High-point's competitors are shivering in their boots over this powerful alliance. Well Dennis, I congratulate you. Be assured that with this attitude you just displayed you made me decide never to recommend ET Inc., for any of my present and future projects. Im sure that we will survive quite nicely without your recommendations. DB To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: if_fxp - the real point
On Wed, Mar 14, 2001 at 02:41:53PM -0800, Kent Stewart wrote: With 2000 and above, your system will check for non-digitally signed dll's and etc. Being signed has nothing to do with correctly working. The project I was speaking about wanted to be able to do something about you buying that wonderful new video card, or ATA-100 card -- receving the vendor's device driver and finding it decreases the stability of your system. Windows has a specification and convention of how drivers should be written. How do you know some driver actually follows it? That is the basic problem this grant is researching. -- -- David ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) GNU is Not Unix / Linux Is Not UniX To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: if_fxp - the real point
On Wed, Mar 14, 2001 at 04:51:14PM -0500, Dennis wrote: Why would they need to do that? Every time you load a program it updates the libraries, breaking older programs. Its a philosophical problem. You dont need a grant to figure it out. You JUST DON'T GET IT [academic research]. And any attempt to explain it to you will obviously be wasted time. -- -- David ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) GNU is Not Unix / Linux Is Not UniX To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: if_fxp - the real point
At 10:37 PM 03/10/2001, Peter Seebach wrote: If anyone has a specific part number or model information about the new unsupported PHY, I'd be happy to look it up and tell you what, if anything, I can find out. I can't send out copies of the source without some kind of formal approval, but I could certainly at least answer questions like "do we have a BSD-flavored driver that works with this". As it turns out (as usual), its not an "unsupported PHY" but an error in the assumption that the correct PHY information is where DG's logic thinks it should be in the eeprom. Reading the PHY info from the part directly allows you to correctly identify and set up the phy, at least on the SuperMicro MB that I was having problems with. For those with boards that give the "unsupported PHY" message who want a "quick fix", you might try just forcing the address to 1 and the device_type to 7, as every eepro100 that I've tested uses the 82555 PHY. Dennis To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: if_fxp - the real point
On Sat, Mar 10, 2001 at 10:30:08AM -0600, Peter Seebach wrote: For that matter, is the fxp still the most-recommended driver on Alpha? It *never* has been the recommended driver on FreeBSD/Alpha. The fxp driver has had issues on Alpha for a long time. Andrew will fix something with it, then it breaks again for some, etc... DG has an Alpha, but I don't think he has ever turned it on. He certainly has never done and Alpha-specific fxp fixes that I am aware of. The `guaranteed to work on Alpha driver' is anything supported by the `de' driver, as that is what the built-in NIC is on older Alpha's so OS's have no choice but deal with them. After that, I would say any of the `xl' 3Com cards. Bill Paul tested his just about all his drivers on an Alpha when developing them. The really nice thing about the `xl' 3Com cards is they don't have the alignment requirements of most of the other NICs in existence. Thus you can get really good performance on the Alpha. Behind the `xl' 3Com cards, would be any DEC 21143 based NIC which is supported by Bill Paul's `dc' driver. The nice thing about `de' and `dc' cards is SRM recognizes them. I got the impression there were some alignment issues that might be cheaper to solve on i386 than Alpha. Both `xl' and `fxp' cards do not have strict alignment issues (which makes them very nice and reduces a memory copy). The problems with the `fxp' cards is simply how its driver works on the Alpha. -- -- David ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) GNU is Not Unix / Linux Is Not UniX To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: if_fxp - the real point
On 2001-03-10 21:56 -0600, Peter Seebach [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Out of idle curiousity, has the NIH syndrome died down enough that it might hypothetically be possible for the three major *BSD camps to cooperate on this kind of thing? Form an organization the purpose of which is to get access to driver docs *for all three systems*? An organization which can claim to represent 2N or 3N users, instead of N, *might* be able to get people to listen more closely... Especially if it maintained a page describing hardware and vendor relations, and a lot of people got in the habit of linking to it. Does Intel care if there's a page saying "Intel has refused to provide specs, so we are obliged to recommend Frobozz Magic Ethernet instead"? Probably not, but they *might*. More than they care about mutterings on mailing lists, certainly. Peter, This sounds like something that Daemon News might be able to help with. Are you interested in spending some time on it? Our staff is stretched very thin right now and can't really take on any more projects without additional volunteers. If you or another interested party has the time, though, I think that the attempt should be made and that Daemon News is the right umbrella for it. Greg -- Gregory S. Sutter The measure of a man is the way mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] he bears up under misfortune. http://www.daemonnews.org/--Plutarch hkp://wwwkeys.pgp.net/0x845DFEDD To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: if_fxp - the real point
Chen Zhao wrote: \- Mike Smith [EMAIL PROTECTED] stated on /-[Fri, Mar 09, 2001 at 06:02:22PM -0800]: NDA's in this particular space serve a limited set of purposes: - They constitute engineering damage control; witness Realtek's unhappiness at Bill's honest commentary on their documented parts. Oh, is there also a recommended gigabit adapter? Tigon? Intel? STAY AWAY FROM THE INTEL GIG CARDS!! (Sorry for the shouting, but it is an important point). I have the NDA'ed docs for the Intel gig and fxp cards. After Intel's spectacular efforts to bury Johnathan Lemon's driver for their gig card (that outperformed the Intel Linux driver by something like a factor of 5), I have lost all respect for Intel's networking division. As long as Intel are being this stupid, Intel hardware is never going to be well supported. The fxp driver is starting to slip behind because Intel wont give DG updated fxp docs without him signing an NDA that prevents him from releasing the updated driver. Cheers, -Peter -- Peter Wemm - [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED] "All of this is for nothing if we don't go to the stars" - JMS/B5 To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: if_fxp - the real point
\- Peter Wemm [EMAIL PROTECTED] stated on /- [Sat, Mar 10, 2001 at 04:49:12AM -0800]: I have the NDA'ed docs for the Intel gig and fxp cards. After Intel's spectacular efforts to bury Johnathan Lemon's driver for their gig card (that outperformed the Intel Linux driver by something like a factor of 5), I have lost all respect for Intel's networking division. Sorry to hear that. The last thing I can find on the Intel gig stuff was dated at the end of 1999, where Johnathan Lemon wasn't sure if he could release his version, and Matt Jacob had a version hacked from the released Linux drivers. I take it Intel didn't give the hoped for permission. As long as Intel are being this stupid, Intel hardware is never going to be well supported. The fxp driver is starting to slip behind because Intel wont give DG updated fxp docs without him signing an NDA that prevents him from releasing the updated driver. That part I get, hence the question of what's the next best card/driver. I was also (coincidentally) thinking of the Intel ads which feature Yahoo! ads using servers with their processors. I was wondering if perhaps someone technical at Yahoo might have some clout with Intel. Yes, I realize that's pretty naive. :) \_End_of_Statement_/ To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: if_fxp - the real point
In message [EMAIL PROTECTED], Chen Zhao writes: What is the next most (unofficially of course :) recommended NIC in terms of driver stability, card reliability and performance, and driver efficiency (low overhead, etc.), ignoring for the moment actual NIC price, and just judging from a technical perspective? For that matter, is the fxp still the most-recommended driver on Alpha? I was playing with ethernet cards on a NetBSD/Alpha system, and under NetBSD, on an Alpha, a 3Com Etherlink XL ran rings around an Intel card... But on i386, I get at least as good performance from the Intel cards. Skimming the driver, I got the impression there were some alignment issues that might be cheaper to solve on i386 than Alpha. Would the xl be next on the list, or would it be one of the previously mentioned D-Link/Netgear cards for which documentation is freely available? I've always thought that the latter brands were lower performance cards... The tulip cards can be quirky, if nothing else. I used to like the VIA Rhine cards, because they were cheap, and I had no problems with them... until suddenly they started crashing at 100Mbps. I don't know why; I ran some of them under very heavy loads at 100Mbps. I can't tell whether it was new cards or a driver change. Jason Thorpe did a radically reworked Tulip driver for NetBSD that seems to handle the majority of the cheapo 21140-series clones quite nicely. -s To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: if_fxp - the real point
As a newcomer to this, I'm a little confused. There's a slew of datasheets at Intel's web site http://www.intel.com/design/network/datashts/index.htm that don't seem to require NDA. (Just this week, I used the 82559 docs to implement a polled version of if_fxp). If the components in question are not there, can anyone identify them? Romain Kang Disclaimer: I speak for myself alone, [EMAIL PROTECTED]except when indicated otherwise. To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: if_fxp - the real point
In article local.mail.freebsd-hackers/[EMAIL PROTECTED] you write: As a newcomer to this, I'm a little confused. There's a slew of datasheets at Intel's web site http://www.intel.com/design/network/datashts/index.htm that don't seem to require NDA. (Just this week, I used the 82559 docs to implement a polled version of if_fxp). If the components in question are not there, can anyone identify them? Datasheets != manuals. The datasheet simply tells you "this is the overall purpose of this feature". "This is a high level view of selected registers". What it doesn't tell you is how to put everything together, nor does it provide critical information such as the layout of the datastructures needed. Take a concrete example, the datasheet for the 82558: http://www.intel.com/design/network/datashts/297360.htm S 4.1.2.7 describes how the chip DMAs data to/from host memory. What is the layout of the control block for the transfer? S 4.2 talks about the EEPROM interface. How do you determine the size of the attached EEPROM, which is needed in order to know how many address bits to shift in? S 4.3.2 mentions PHY flow control; PHY based and flow based. How do you select between these two? Where do you set up the flow control parameters? You can't find the answers to any of these in the datasheets. The datasheets may provide a tiny bit of information, and hint at how things actually operate, but there is not sufficient information to develop a driver from them. -- Jonathan To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: if_fxp - the real point
At 01:11 AM 03/10/2001, Bill Paul wrote: I think its been mentioned several times in this and other threads that intel has a driver for LINUX that is effective documentation on the board, and the code is public (although you may have to stick an intel copyright in the code also). Whoever mentioned this was not thinking clearly. A manual is effective documentation for a NIC. Sample driver code alone is not. It's handy, but it's not enough. When you write a driver, you make certain design decisions based on the information in the manual and the OS you're developing for. By forcing someone to rely soley on your driver to see how the board works, you're limiting their ability to make their own design decisions. What works well for Windows or Linux may be mediocre for BSD. Besides, Intel engineers have a knack for choosing really confusing register names. confusing or not, the logic to fix the driver is available. You can whine about there being "no full documentation", but guess what? FreeBSD doesnt have "full documentation" either. Do any of your drivers have "full documentation" for anyone that want to modify them? Fixing Greenman's driver is no party either as he hasnt documented any of the phy-related stuff he uses. And again, saying "but there's a Linux driver" just gives vendors an excuse to perpetuate their stupidity. I'm not keen to give them this opportunity. You "guys" regularly say to me "you have the source, fix it". Source that works IS documentation. As someone whose read a few controller specs in my time, I can tell you that "full documentation" is sometimes a lot less useful than code that works, because the docs dont always make it clear what needs to be done to achieve a certain goal. You guys continue not to understand why companies dont disclose board info freely. You end up competing with your own customers. They dont want people buying gray market parts and selling $9. boards. Its very easy to clone a board with 2 chips on it these days. I'm sorry, that doesn't wash. *I* am not trying to compete with anyone. Lord knows I can't afford to fabricate my own controller chips on my salary. its not about you, man, its about the clone manufacturers that can make cards that use your or intel's drivers without any engineering. You dont have to "fabricate chips", you buy them from Intel. Thats what I mean by "competing with your own customers". Intel sells chips for $8. and boards for $32. they odnt want to have to compete with boards that sell for $12. with their $8. chips. Your lame argument might be that "they sell the chips anyway" , but that doesnt work, becuase they make money on the boards at 32 and dont at 12. Notice that there arent really any Intel eepro100 clones? Because intel makes sure that the spec isnt public, so they can go after anyone that clones them. Western Digital in the 80s learned the hard way. You do all the marketing, get software written for your cards, and then the taiwanese cash in on it and you have to lower your prices to where you cant make enough money to get back your marketing outlay. DB To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: if_fxp - the real point
The tulip cards can be quirky, if nothing else. I used to like the VIA Rhine cards, because they were cheap, and I had no problems with them... until suddenly they started crashing at 100Mbps. I don't know why; I ran some of them under very heavy loads at 100Mbps. I can't tell whether it was new cards or a driver change. Cards generally arent "quirky"; drivers are incomplete. Its all about the software. DB To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: if_fxp - the real point
At 01:49 PM 03/10/2001, Romain Kang wrote: As a newcomer to this, I'm a little confused. There's a slew of datasheets at Intel's web site http://www.intel.com/design/network/datashts/index.htm that don't seem to require NDA. (Just this week, I used the 82559 docs to implement a polled version of if_fxp). Is anyone up on the latest legal stuff? There was a ruling that universities cant be held liable for releasing NDA informationuniversities and states I think. I know we couldnt sell source to universities or the government because it wasnt protected (ie you couldnt sue them if it leaked out). Maybe we can get an academic to sign something and leak out the info :-) Dennis To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: if_fxp - the real point
Is there a point of contact at Intel that we could all send e-mail to or even send a formal letter? I am sure my buying 50 or so boards a year isn't going to make a dent at Intel's bottom line, but considering how their stock is doing lately and if we all contribute... Thanks, Tim To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: if_fxp - the real point
At 03:37 PM 03/10/2001, Tim wrote: Is there a point of contact at Intel that we could all send e-mail to or even send a formal letter? I am sure my buying 50 or so boards a year isn't going to make a dent at Intel's bottom line, but considering how their stock is doing lately and if we all contribute... Um, I dont think your going to get intel to change its policy The policy exists for a reason. Plus, they are already selling lots of boards with the existing driver, so how many more will they sell? the delta isnt enough for them to put someone on the case. What will really get them is some press on how bad their drivers are. Their eepro100 driver for linux is unusable under load. and from what I've hard their gigabit driver isnt much better. Letters dont do anything. its all about image. Dennis Thanks, Tim To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: if_fxp - the real point
My point of (failed) contact last April was a Gary @ 503 264 7243 (I was informed by Theo that he was "Intel's 'Open Source' representative) To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: if_fxp - the real point
In message [EMAIL PROTECTED] Jonathan Lemon writes: : You can't find the answers to any of these in the datasheets. The : datasheets may provide a tiny bit of information, and hint at how things : actually operate, but there is not sufficient information to develop a : driver from them. Their older parts (the 82593) had this same problem. You had to have some sort of inside tract to get good information. And even then it was difficult at best. Warner To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: if_fxp - the real point
Okay, maybe I'm missing something... 1. Has anyone tried one of these new Intel parts with BSD/OS? 2. Do any of the people involved with this have source licenses to BSD/OS? I am quite sure BSDi hasn't been swamped with "help, my Intel card isn't working" requests. I'm also quite sure that the source license includes the Intel stuff. Now, that doesn't do *much* more good than the Linux driver... but it might help *some*. If anyone has a specific part number or model information about the new unsupported PHY, I'd be happy to look it up and tell you what, if anything, I can find out. I can't send out copies of the source without some kind of formal approval, but I could certainly at least answer questions like "do we have a BSD-flavored driver that works with this". -s To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: if_fxp - the real point
Okay, maybe I'm missing something... 1. Has anyone tried one of these new Intel parts with BSD/OS? 2. Do any of the people involved with this have source licenses to BSD/OS? I am quite sure BSDi hasn't been swamped with "help, my Intel card isn't working" requests. I'm also quite sure that the source license includes the Intel stuff. Now, that doesn't do *much* more good than the Linux driver... but it might help *some*. Actually, I don't think it does. I spoke with Jeert about this a while back; his attitude isn't much better than Intel's on this topic. If anyone has a specific part number or model information about the new unsupported PHY, I'd be happy to look it up and tell you what, if anything, I can find out. I can't send out copies of the source without some kind of formal approval, but I could certainly at least answer questions like "do we have a BSD-flavored driver that works with this". The FreeBSD project already has a BSD/OS source distribution, however the required information is NOT THERE. Ok? -- ... every activity meets with opposition, everyone who acts has his rivals and unfortunately opponents also. But not because people want to be opponents, rather because the tasks and relationships force people to take different points of view. [Dr. Fritz Todt] V I C T O R Y N O T V E N G E A N C E To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: if_fxp - the real point
In message [EMAIL PROTECTED], Mike Smith writes: The FreeBSD project already has a BSD/OS source distribution, however the required information is NOT THERE. Ok? Okay. I just figured I'd ask, since it's information I have. Hmm. Out of idle curiousity, has the NIH syndrome died down enough that it might hypothetically be possible for the three major *BSD camps to cooperate on this kind of thing? Form an organization the purpose of which is to get access to driver docs *for all three systems*? An organization which can claim to represent 2N or 3N users, instead of N, *might* be able to get people to listen more closely... Especially if it maintained a page describing hardware and vendor relations, and a lot of people got in the habit of linking to it. Does Intel care if there's a page saying "Intel has refused to provide specs, so we are obliged to recommend Frobozz Magic Ethernet instead"? Probably not, but they *might*. More than they care about mutterings on mailing lists, certainly. -s To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: if_fxp - the real point
Out of idle curiousity, has the NIH syndrome died down enough that it might hypothetically be possible for the three major *BSD camps to cooperate on this kind of thing? No, I'm afraid it hasn't. -- ... every activity meets with opposition, everyone who acts has his rivals and unfortunately opponents also. But not because people want to be opponents, rather because the tasks and relationships force people to take different points of view. [Dr. Fritz Todt] V I C T O R Y N O T V E N G E A N C E To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: if_fxp - the real point
Tim wrote: Is there a point of contact at Intel that we could all send e-mail to or even send a formal letter? I am sure my buying 50 or so boards a year isn't going to make a dent at Intel's bottom line, but considering how their stock is doing lately and if we all contribute... Craig Barrett, [EMAIL PROTECTED] That should get somebody's attention pretty quickly. -- "Where am I, and what am I doing in this handbasket?" Wes Peters Softweyr LLC [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://softweyr.com/ To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: if_fxp - the real point
On Thu, Mar 08, 2001 at 06:13:07PM -0800, Alex Zepeda wrote: However, there *ARE* some of us who aren't intimate with your fxp problems. The problem does exist. I have a board that the `fxp' driver splits this out for: fxp0: warning: unsupported PHY, type = 17, addr = 2 fxp1: warning: unsupported PHY, type = 17, addr = 2 You've got a valid problem. Go away. "You've got a valid problem, go away." huh?? His points are very valid about maintenance of the `fxp' driver. His views on how to make something happen are what is a little out of touch. -- -- David ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) GNU is Not Unix / Linux Is Not UniX To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: if_fxp - the real point
You've got a valid problem. Go away. "You've got a valid problem, go away." huh?? His points are very valid about maintenance of the `fxp' driver. His views on how to make something happen are what is a little out of touch. I tried sitting with my hands folded. It didnt work. DB To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: if_fxp - the real point
Call BSDi (numbers on their website) and ask to speak to Gary Johnson (CEO) or Mark Garver (senior VP) and ask them yourself. If you get a useful answer, please tell the rest of us; especially me, since I burnt out trying to make it happen. Ive spoken with Mr Johnson several times. hes the biggest reason that BSDI is what it is. Amazing that hes still there. He has no concept of what the market wants. First he wanted to challenge microsoft (at similar prices) for the server market now he wants to be redhat. funny guy. If you're unhappy with the results you're getting from Gary, try calling Kirk McKusick. Keep kicking people. Wait. Isn't "kicking people" what I'm getting beat up for in this thread? I dont call BSDI (anymore). Its generally a waste of time. Dennis To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: if_fxp - the real point
What board is this? Sam - Original Message - From: "David O'Brien" [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: "Alex Zepeda" [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Friday, March 09, 2001 4:42 AM Subject: Re: if_fxp - the real point On Thu, Mar 08, 2001 at 06:13:07PM -0800, Alex Zepeda wrote: However, there *ARE* some of us who aren't intimate with your fxp problems. The problem does exist. I have a board that the `fxp' driver splits this out for: fxp0: warning: unsupported PHY, type = 17, addr = 2 fxp1: warning: unsupported PHY, type = 17, addr = 2 To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: if_fxp - the real point
Ive spoken with Mr Johnson several times. hes the biggest reason that BSDI is what it is. Amazing that hes still there. He has no concept of what the market wants. First he wanted to challenge microsoft (at similar prices) for the server market now he wants to be redhat. funny guy. If you're unhappy with the results you're getting from Gary, try calling Kirk McKusick. Keep kicking people. Wait. Isn't "kicking people" what I'm getting beat up for in this thread? Not specifically; it's kicking the *wrong* people, which is usually what gets people upset. Like I said before, you're on the mark with your problem description, just missing it with your solution. At any rate, in case you missed it, Jonathan Lemon has offered to take up the maintenance of the fxp driver, and if you have samples of the offending hardware, you should forward them to him You might want to coordinate with Larry Baird at GTA ([EMAIL PROTECTED], AFAIR) to make sure you don't double up. I can vouch for Jonathan's reliability and competence; I've also sent him hardware in the past with good results. I dont call BSDI (anymore). Its generally a waste of time. I wish I could offer anything in their defense. 8( Regards, Mike -- ... every activity meets with opposition, everyone who acts has his rivals and unfortunately opponents also. But not because people want to be opponents, rather because the tasks and relationships force people to take different points of view. [Dr. Fritz Todt] V I C T O R Y N O T V E N G E A N C E To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: if_fxp - the real point
What board is this? If this is the board I think it is, it's a Supermicro P6DLE dual Slot-1 motherboard with an integrated Intel 82559 (no external PHY). (I had this board for some time before I gave it to David, it was originally donated to FTL by Bob Willcox.) Sam - Original Message - From: "David O'Brien" [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: "Alex Zepeda" [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Friday, March 09, 2001 4:42 AM Subject: Re: if_fxp - the real point On Thu, Mar 08, 2001 at 06:13:07PM -0800, Alex Zepeda wrote: However, there *ARE* some of us who aren't intimate with your fxp problems. The problem does exist. I have a board that the `fxp' driver splits this out for: fxp0: warning: unsupported PHY, type = 17, addr = 2 fxp1: warning: unsupported PHY, type = 17, addr = 2 To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message -- ... every activity meets with opposition, everyone who acts has his rivals and unfortunately opponents also. But not because people want to be opponents, rather because the tasks and relationships force people to take different points of view. [Dr. Fritz Todt] V I C T O R Y N O T V E N G E A N C E To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: if_fxp - the real point
On Fri, 9 Mar 2001, Mike Smith wrote: What board is this? If this is the board I think it is, it's a Supermicro P6DLE dual Slot-1 motherboard with an integrated Intel 82559 (no external PHY). I've worked with this board before (don't have any on hand anymore). I remember getting the "unsupported PHY" error on `ifconfig fxpX up'; the interface worked tolerably apart from spitting out the error, although it was not possible to get or see the media via ifconfig. I traded them all in for L440GX+'s, though, so I can't send any, unfortunately. Dan Debertin -- ++ Unix is the worst operating system, except for all others. ++ Dan Debertin ++ Senior Systems Administrator ++ Bitstream Underground, LLC ++ [EMAIL PROTECTED] ++ (612)321-9290 x108 ++ GPG Fingerprint: 0BC5 F4D6 649F D0C8 D1A7 CAE4 BEF4 0A5C 300D 2387 To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: if_fxp - the real point
Gr. (Yes, that's a bad omen. Get the women and children to safety now.) (On second thought, leave the women.) I think there's one important point that a lot of you are missing here, which is GETTING DOCUMENTATION. I've seen a couple people suggest that they'd be willing to donate time/code/etc to fix the fxp driver, but I strongly suspect that most of these people don't have the slighest idea what's really involved. You can't just look at the driver code, poke at it for a while, and expect the answer to fall out: you need the damn manual for it. And you can't get that from Intel because they're NDA nazis. (Johnathan Lemon is the one exception to this since he apparently has ways to gain access to Intel documentation thanks to his job. I think he's still subject to NDAs though, so I question just how much help he can really provide. Not that I don't encourge him to do an end run around Intel wherever he can, of course.) I see lots of finger-pointing here, yet nobody seems to be prepared to fault the real culprit, namely Intel. Nobody sends nasty e-mails to their Intel sales reps or other high mucky-mucks taking them to task over their nonsensical NDA requirements. Nobody makes any effort to explain to them just how much more sense it would make and how much more money they would earn by simply preparing some decent manuals for a change and not being so anal-retentive about releasing them. If everyone would concentate their energy on this for a change instead of sniping at each other, I would be a happy man. (Alright, I'm exagerating. It would take significantly more than that to make me happy, but that's a rant for another day.) Right now I'd like to be able to write some more NIC drivers, but I have the following problems: Tigon 3: --- 3Com now owns Alteon's gigabit NIC business, and Alteon's open driver development program seems to have been killed off. To make matters worse, the Tigon 3 seems to actually be a Broadcom product called the BCM 5700. Broadcom an even bigger NDA nazi than Intel, if you can believe that, and 3Com usually has no idea what's going on with regards to hardware that it it didn't built itself. It also has a tendency to drag its feet when it comes to putting together decent manuals for release to non-NDA partners. 3Com 3CR990 --- This is 3Com's ARM-based 10/100 NIC that can do hardware encryption. I have no idea how to get programming info for this NIC out of 3Com without NDA. Level1 LXT1000 -- This is a gigabit MAC which D-Link is shipping on their gigabit ethernet cards. Intel owns Level1 now, and documentation for the LXT1000 controller is nowhere to be found. Broadcom 10mbps homePNA --- I tried navigating Broadcom's sales/support maze looking for info on this chip, they told me they weren't interested in releasing any info without NDA at this time. From what I've been told, this chip has some other functionality built into it which allows it to be used for more than just homePNA networking, and Broadcom simply doesn't want to tell people about it. I don't care one way or the other. USB 802.11 wireless NICs - Somebody pointed one of these out to me recently, I think they're a D-Link product. Again, I don't know who makes them or where to find manuals. No documentation, no cookie. There's probably other cases here that I've forgotten. Regardless, it really cheeses me off when people ask me "hey, I just saw such-and-such card that looks really neat; if I get you one, can you write a driver for it? I'd be happy to test it for you." Having a sample card doesn't do a damn thing for me THE STINKING PROGRAMMING MANUAL. If I *had* the manuals for these things, I'd be probably already be working on drivers! "But Bill, you work for BSDi now. Can't they get you manuals?" Working for BSDi is irrelevant: I can't sign any NDAs if I want to release driver source, and I do want to release the source. And there isn't a designated person at BSDi that I can turn to to help turn up the heat on recalcitrant vendors. I'm not willing to go sneaking around and mooching these things from secret sources since it just perpetuates the officially sanctioned vendor stupidity. I don't want to have meetings, negotiations or "strategic partnerships," I just want the stupid programming manuals without NDAs. A few other things while I'm here. D-Link, LinkSys and Netgear do *NOT* make their own 10/100 NIC controller chips. They buy them from other companies. In some cases, they buy the whole card and simply stamp their name on it. There were at least 4 companies at one point all selling the exact same PNIC 82c169 card under different names. LinkSys is currently using the ADMtek Centaur PCI and Cardbus chips in their 10/100 NICs. Netgear is using the NatSemi DP83815 chipset on their FA311 and FA312 cards. D-Link uses RealTek 8139 and VIA Rhine II chips depending on just which model NIC you happen to get. The D-Link DFE-570TX quad port
Re: if_fxp - the real point
Hi. Of the 8 machines that I own, all of the NIC's work just fine. Thank you for doing such a great job! To the rest of you: read the hardware.txt. Use a supported card or go suck a rotten egg. Bill Paul wrote: Gr. (Yes, that's a bad omen. Get the women and children to safety now.) (On second thought, leave the women.) I think there's one important point that a lot of you are missing here, which is GETTING DOCUMENTATION. I've seen a couple people suggest that they'd be willing to donate time/code/etc to fix the fxp driver, but I strongly suspect that most of these people don't have the slighest idea what's really involved. You can't just look at the driver code, poke at it for a while, and expect the answer to fall out: you need the damn manual for it. And you can't get that from Intel because they're NDA nazis. (Johnathan Lemon is the one exception to this since he apparently has ways to gain access to Intel documentation thanks to his job. I think he's still subject to NDAs though, so I question just how much help he can really provide. Not that I don't encourge him to do an end run around Intel wherever he can, of course.) I see lots of finger-pointing here, yet nobody seems to be prepared to fault the real culprit, namely Intel. Nobody sends nasty e-mails to their Intel sales reps or other high mucky-mucks taking them to task over their nonsensical NDA requirements. Nobody makes any effort to explain to them just how much more sense it would make and how much more money they would earn by simply preparing some decent manuals for a change and not being so anal-retentive about releasing them. If everyone would concentate their energy on this for a change instead of sniping at each other, I would be a happy man. (Alright, I'm exagerating. It would take significantly more than that to make me happy, but that's a rant for another day.) Right now I'd like to be able to write some more NIC drivers, but I have the following problems: Tigon 3: --- 3Com now owns Alteon's gigabit NIC business, and Alteon's open driver development program seems to have been killed off. To make matters worse, the Tigon 3 seems to actually be a Broadcom product called the BCM 5700. Broadcom an even bigger NDA nazi than Intel, if you can believe that, and 3Com usually has no idea what's going on with regards to hardware that it it didn't built itself. It also has a tendency to drag its feet when it comes to putting together decent manuals for release to non-NDA partners. 3Com 3CR990 --- This is 3Com's ARM-based 10/100 NIC that can do hardware encryption. I have no idea how to get programming info for this NIC out of 3Com without NDA. Level1 LXT1000 -- This is a gigabit MAC which D-Link is shipping on their gigabit ethernet cards. Intel owns Level1 now, and documentation for the LXT1000 controller is nowhere to be found. Broadcom 10mbps homePNA --- I tried navigating Broadcom's sales/support maze looking for info on this chip, they told me they weren't interested in releasing any info without NDA at this time. From what I've been told, this chip has some other functionality built into it which allows it to be used for more than just homePNA networking, and Broadcom simply doesn't want to tell people about it. I don't care one way or the other. USB 802.11 wireless NICs - Somebody pointed one of these out to me recently, I think they're a D-Link product. Again, I don't know who makes them or where to find manuals. No documentation, no cookie. There's probably other cases here that I've forgotten. Regardless, it really cheeses me off when people ask me "hey, I just saw such-and-such card that looks really neat; if I get you one, can you write a driver for it? I'd be happy to test it for you." Having a sample card doesn't do a damn thing for me THE STINKING PROGRAMMING MANUAL. If I *had* the manuals for these things, I'd be probably already be working on drivers! "But Bill, you work for BSDi now. Can't they get you manuals?" Working for BSDi is irrelevant: I can't sign any NDAs if I want to release driver source, and I do want to release the source. And there isn't a designated person at BSDi that I can turn to to help turn up the heat on recalcitrant vendors. I'm not willing to go sneaking around and mooching these things from secret sources since it just perpetuates the officially sanctioned vendor stupidity. I don't want to have meetings, negotiations or "strategic partnerships," I just want the stupid programming manuals without NDAs. A few other things while I'm here. D-Link, LinkSys and Netgear do *NOT* make their own 10/100 NIC controller chips. They buy them from other companies. In some cases, they buy the whole card and simply stamp their name on it. There were at least 4 companies at one point all selling the exact same PNIC 82c169 card under
Re: if_fxp - the real point
It seems Bill Paul wrote: "But Bill, you work for BSDi now. Can't they get you manuals?" Working for BSDi is irrelevant: I can't sign any NDAs if I want to release driver source, and I do want to release the source. And there isn't a designated person at BSDi that I can turn to to help turn up the heat on recalcitrant vendors. I'm not willing to go sneaking around and mooching these things from secret sources since it just perpetuates the officially sanctioned vendor stupidity. I don't want to have meetings, negotiations or "strategic partnerships," I just want the stupid programming manuals without NDAs. I hear you! I have the same problems getting ATA controller/device docs out of the vendors, but sometimes it helps trying from another angle. One example is Promise, I mailed and phoned them for about a year, and got exactly nothing back, but it took Jeroen (Asmodai) one mail to get thier attention AND docs (thanks!), the morale being that sometimes it helps getting other people involved. Please understand that I dont mean that everybody and his dog should be mail bombing a vendor to get docs, that we leave for the other guys :)... -Sren To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
The ideal NIC (Re: if_fxp - the real point)
Bear with me and allow me my delusions while I daydream... What with FPGA technology as reasonable as it is, and the amount of hw/sw talent on these lists, maybe people should band together and come up with a NIC? Maybe have native mode + Tulip/PNIC clone compatibility mode. Take a look at www.opencores.org for a start. What production volumes are required before ASICs are feasible? What about having a FreeBSD CDROM + NIC bundle featuring whatever card gets designed? If ya can't join 'em, beat 'em. Okay. Back to work and reality. :-) Eddy --- Brotsman Dreger, Inc. EverQuick Internet / EternalCommerce Division E-Mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Phone: (316) 794-8922 --- To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: The ideal NIC (Re: if_fxp - the real point)
:What production volumes are required before ASICs are feasible? What :about having a FreeBSD CDROM + NIC bundle featuring whatever card gets :designed? : :If ya can't join 'em, beat 'em. : :Okay. Back to work and reality. :-) : :Eddy Designing an ASIC will have an NRE of probably around $50,000, and you'd have to do a run of probably around 10,000 chips (at $1-$2 a chip) for it to even come close to being cost effective. And that's assuming you get the design right the first time. But that's only half the problem. Building the PCI boards themselves in the smallish qantities that we are talking about will be quite expensive. Ultimately you would not be paying much less then you would for a cheap board already on the market (and probably considerably more). An FPGA can be programmed in singles, but they are very expensive to buy in small quantities (lots less then a 1000 chips), and you have all sorts of other issues involved as well including possibly needing to purchase a second chip to help out with the PCI bus, and a serial cmos eprom for chip initialization. And the board, of course. This would probably cost even more then an ASIC. FPGAs also tend to eat a lot of power, and highspeed CMOS FPGAs are very expensive. And, on top of all of that you still need to buy a separate filter / protection block (those black rectangle things you see on ethernet boards), and again those can be quite costly in small quantities. -Matt To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: if_fxp - the real point
I think there's one important point that a lot of you are missing here, which is GETTING DOCUMENTATION. Perhaps a first step towards leaning on the vendors for documentation is to publically declare our support for those vendors who *do* release documentation under reasonable terms. One way to do this is to acknowledge those vendors in the hardware section of the handbook, and encourage people to support them by buying thier products. --lyndon To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: if_fxp - the real point
Yes. This is good. I'd vote for LSI-Logic as being a sterling example of making documentation available. I'd out QLogic and others way down the list as the "don't get it" variety. I think there's one important point that a lot of you are missing here, which is GETTING DOCUMENTATION. Perhaps a first step towards leaning on the vendors for documentation is to publically declare our support for those vendors who *do* release documentation under reasonable terms. One way to do this is to acknowledge those vendors in the hardware section of the handbook, and encourage people to support them by buying thier products. --lyndon To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: The ideal NIC (Re: if_fxp - the real point)
On Fri, Mar 09, 2001 at 11:03:33PM +, E.B. Dreger scribbled: | Bear with me and allow me my delusions while I daydream... | | What with FPGA technology as reasonable as it is, and the amount of hw/sw | talent on these lists, maybe people should band together and come up with | a NIC? Maybe have native mode + Tulip/PNIC clone compatibility mode. Altera and Xilinx do not sell these things in small quantities. And you probably need a high gate count FPGA anyway. (read: expensive) | Take a look at www.opencores.org for a start. I highly doubt their feasibility. The number one problem being the development tools required are not "given out" for free. Do ou have any idea how much work it is to write a complete VHDL/Verilog library? :) Even if you do finish writing one, who is going to test it? You will also note that OpenCore does not have a list of their developers. (I wonder if they have more than 5 master-level VLSI design engineers.) The reason against your idea is the same reason that people do not run Linux on Sun Enterprise 1's. At that cost level, we want it to just *work*. Then again, who wants to GPL their chips? | What production volumes are required before ASICs are feasible? What The smallest feasible industrial volumes that I have seen are greater than 1 chips. | about having a FreeBSD CDROM + NIC bundle featuring whatever card gets | designed? | | If ya can't join 'em, beat 'em. I think surrendering ourselves to Big Industries in this case is a smart move. | Okay. Back to work and reality. :-) -- +---+ | [EMAIL PROTECTED] | [EMAIL PROTECTED] | | http://iteration.net/~keichii | Yes, BSD is a conspiracy. | +---+ To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: if_fxp - the real point
I think its been mentioned several times in this and other threads that intel has a driver for LINUX that is effective documentation on the board, and the code is public (although you may have to stick an intel copyright in the code also). It hasn't been mentioned in this thread that the Intel driver is adequate documentation, because it isn't. (I've read it.) Sometimes NDAs arent really what they are. There is certainly no damage to intel since they've released their own driver for linux for the board...it would be pretty difficult for them to go after someone for disclosing something that they've already disclosed themselves. Part of the problem is that Intel *haven't* disclosed a lot of the information that's necessary in order to write a driver other than the one they've written. Much of the information that a driver author requires is not clearly disclosed in source for another OS' driver, and again, this is the case with the Intel driver. Just in case it's not clear, I have on a number of occasions been forced to reverse-engineer drivers from source, so I can claim to speak on this topic with some authority. 8) You guys continue not to understand why companies dont disclose board info freely. You end up competing with your own customers. They dont want people buying gray market parts and selling $9. boards. Its very easy to clone a board with 2 chips on it these days. This actually has almost nothing to do with it; placing the programming documentation under NDA does almost nothing to preclude a competitor from either cloning the part or for that matter obtaining the documentation themselves. NDA's in this particular space serve a limited set of purposes: - They constitute engineering damage control; witness Realtek's unhappiness at Bill's honest commentary on their documented parts. - They provide a theoretical underwriting for the "intellectual property" that a company's accounting department likes to think it has. - They allow a company to control (to some degree) the uses to which its products are put. This is typically a marketting angle (by forcing a customer to negotiate, you can force a variety of concessions, co-deals, etc.). And in our case, they also serve to stifle otherwise legitimate support for a product, simply because we don't fit into a category they understand. Irritating, but difficult to deal with. -- ... every activity meets with opposition, everyone who acts has his rivals and unfortunately opponents also. But not because people want to be opponents, rather because the tasks and relationships force people to take different points of view. [Dr. Fritz Todt] V I C T O R Y N O T V E N G E A N C E To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: if_fxp - the real point
I think its been mentioned several times in this and other threads that intel has a driver for LINUX that is effective documentation on the board, and the code is public (although you may have to stick an intel copyright in the code also). Whoever mentioned this was not thinking clearly. A manual is effective documentation for a NIC. Sample driver code alone is not. It's handy, but it's not enough. When you write a driver, you make certain design decisions based on the information in the manual and the OS you're developing for. By forcing someone to rely soley on your driver to see how the board works, you're limiting their ability to make their own design decisions. What works well for Windows or Linux may be mediocre for BSD. Besides, Intel engineers have a knack for choosing really confusing register names. And again, saying "but there's a Linux driver" just gives vendors an excuse to perpetuate their stupidity. I'm not keen to give them this opportunity. You guys continue not to understand why companies dont disclose board info freely. You end up competing with your own customers. They dont want people buying gray market parts and selling $9. boards. Its very easy to clone a board with 2 chips on it these days. I'm sorry, that doesn't wash. *I* am not trying to compete with anyone. Lord knows I can't afford to fabricate my own controller chips on my salary. The users who just want to use the cards certainly don't want to compete with anybody. If anything, I want to help them make money. If your method for squashing competition also angers your allaged 'partners' and costs you money, then you need to come up with a better mechanism. Besides, there's supposed to be competition: it's a free market, remember? If I sell a car with a gas pedal, steering wheel and gear shift, I can't tell all the other car manufacturers not to make their cars with gas pedals, steering wheels and gear shifts, or swear all the people who drive my cars to secrecy so they can't tell anyone how they're meant to be driven. Just because other companies make cars with the same features, that doesn't make them better cars than mine: the consumer should do some research to find the best one instead of buying whatever's cheapest. Naturally, consumers are never that bright. -Bill To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: if_fxp - the real point
\- Mike Smith [EMAIL PROTECTED] stated on /- [Fri, Mar 09, 2001 at 06:02:22PM -0800]: NDA's in this particular space serve a limited set of purposes: - They constitute engineering damage control; witness Realtek's unhappiness at Bill's honest commentary on their documented parts. \_End_of_Statement_/ I have a quick question (this was asked before, but I haven't seen a real answer to it..) for Mr. Paul and other driver authors. Given the NDA situation with Intel, et al., and the possibility that support for the fxp driver may wane a bit, the necessity for future planning prompts me to ask: What is the next most (unofficially of course :) recommended NIC in terms of driver stability, card reliability and performance, and driver efficiency (low overhead, etc.), ignoring for the moment actual NIC price, and just judging from a technical perspective? For instance, the fxp driver has been touted (I've seen this somewhere) as being extremely efficient (the hardware itself also being very high performance), and stable (b/c Mr. Greenman was able to obtain some documents w/o the NDA). The linux analogue of the xl is their driver and NIC of choice. Would the xl be next on the list, or would it be one of the previously mentioned D-Link/Netgear cards for which documentation is freely available? I've always thought that the latter brands were lower performance cards... Thanks for the insights, and (I don't think this ever gets said enough), thanks for a superb OS. Oh, is there also a recommended gigabit adapter? Tigon? Intel? To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
if_fxp - the real point
I dont have time for weenie flame wars with people who are more interested in ignoring problems than fixing them. The point here seems very simple. The intel NICs are on a large number of MBs and the eepro100 is the most popular card on the market. So why is there vitually no maintainer for arguably the most important driver in the freebsd tree when there are maintainers for scads of obscure, must less used cards? freebsd touts a "core team" which provides "direction"...does the "direction" include letting important drivers fall out of maintenance in favor of some crappy netgear card that chokes at 3,000pps? Keeping mainstream FreeBSD releases up to date is more important then working on next years release. Otherwise you just have another linux. DB PS: Whatever happened to all of the "support" that BSDI was going to provide? To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: if_fxp - the real point
In message [EMAIL PROTECTED], Dennis writes: PS: Whatever happened to all of the "support" that BSDI was going to provide? I have no doubt that the BSDi sales office would be happy to sell you a contract. For that matter, I believe they are quite happy to do funded development. Want the fxp driver fixed in FreeBSD? Contact your local sales critter, describe what you want done, get an estimate, and if you like the price, pay it. That's how other people with "thousands of customers" get key hardware support that's a bigger priority for them than it is for other people, and it's not hard. -s To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: if_fxp - the real point
The point here seems very simple. The intel NICs are on a large number of MBs and the eepro100 is the most popular card on the market. So why is there vitually no maintainer for arguably the most important driver in the freebsd tree when there are maintainers for scads of obscure, must less used cards? You appear to have a very wrong idea about how these things work. There's a maintainer for the fxp driver, who currently happens to be out of circulation. Nobody else has stepped up to take it on because obviously nobody is motivated to do the work. As for the rest; there's basically one maintainer for these "scads" of (not actually very) obscure cards - Bill Paul. freebsd touts a "core team" which provides "direction"...does the "direction" include letting important drivers fall out of maintenance in favor of some crappy netgear card that chokes at 3,000pps? I have no idea what you think core should do about this. Are you going to fund a contractor to work on the driver? I didn't think so. What else are we supposed to do? PS: Whatever happened to all of the "support" that BSDI was going to provide? Call BSDi (numbers on their website) and ask to speak to Gary Johnson (CEO) or Mark Garver (senior VP) and ask them yourself. If you get a useful answer, please tell the rest of us; especially me, since I burnt out trying to make it happen. -- ... every activity meets with opposition, everyone who acts has his rivals and unfortunately opponents also. But not because people want to be opponents, rather because the tasks and relationships force people to take different points of view. [Dr. Fritz Todt] V I C T O R Y N O T V E N G E A N C E To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
RE: if_fxp - the real point
There's a maintainer for the fxp driver, who currently happens to be out of circulation. Nobody else has stepped up to take it on because obviously nobody is motivated to do the work. Would love to step up and produce a patch, just too busy at the mo working on other things. However, if this thread is still raging when I get some spare time I'd be happy to contib code. In the meantime, I'll just continue reading this cute conversation. Ak To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: if_fxp - the real point
At 12:35 PM 03/08/2001, Mike Smith wrote: The point here seems very simple. The intel NICs are on a large number of MBs and the eepro100 is the most popular card on the market. So why is there vitually no maintainer for arguably the most important driver in the freebsd tree when there are maintainers for scads of obscure, must less used cards? You appear to have a very wrong idea about how these things work. There's a maintainer for the fxp driver, who currently happens to be out of circulation. Nobody else has stepped up to take it on because obviously nobody is motivated to do the work. As for the rest; there's basically one maintainer for these "scads" of (not actually very) obscure cards - Bill Paul. maybe commercial vendors would be willing to fund some freebsd projects if there was a positive relationship. And DG has been MIA for a long time, not just recently. The last time the fxp driver was broken i found the fix and pointed him at the code. I guess I'll have to fix it this time also, as if maintaining drivers for 6 serial cards and the bwmgr isnt enough for me to do. Maybe I'll sell it this time. :-) PS: Whatever happened to all of the "support" that BSDI was going to provide? Call BSDi (numbers on their website) and ask to speak to Gary Johnson (CEO) or Mark Garver (senior VP) and ask them yourself. If you get a useful answer, please tell the rest of us; especially me, since I burnt out trying to make it happen. Ive spoken with Mr Johnson several times. hes the biggest reason that BSDI is what it is. Amazing that hes still there. He has no concept of what the market wants. First he wanted to challenge microsoft (at similar prices) for the server market now he wants to be redhat. funny guy. So what is the "relationship" that was announced? If they dont provide support or funds, what do they do? DB To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
RE: if_fxp - the real point
At 12:50 PM 03/08/2001, Andy [TECC NOPS] wrote: There's a maintainer for the fxp driver, who currently happens to be out of circulation. Nobody else has stepped up to take it on because obviously nobody is motivated to do the work. Would love to step up and produce a patch, just too busy at the mo working on other things. However, if this thread is still raging when I get some spare time I'd be happy to contib code. In the meantime, I'll just continue reading this cute conversation. "cuteness" is in the eye of the beholder :-) DB To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: if_fxp - the real point
At 12:20 PM 03/08/2001, Peter Seebach wrote: In message [EMAIL PROTECTED], Dennis writes: PS: Whatever happened to all of the "support" that BSDI was going to provide? I have no doubt that the BSDi sales office would be happy to sell you a contract. For that matter, I believe they are quite happy to do funded development. Want the fxp driver fixed in FreeBSD? Contact your local sales critter, describe what you want done, get an estimate, and if you like the price, pay it. That's how other people with "thousands of customers" get key hardware support that's a bigger priority for them than it is for other people, and it's not hard. No. Keeping supported drivers up to date is part of the business of distributing an OS. Thats what "supported" implies. The driver is out of date. Noone is looking for a feature here. We just want it to work. -s To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: if_fxp - the real point
From: Dennis [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: if_fxp - the real point Date: Thu, 08 Mar 2001 12:15:09 -0500 I dont have time for weenie flame wars with people who are more interested in ignoring problems than fixing them. Well, there are different kinds of weenie flame wars. Some come from people who are more interested in ignoring problems than fixing them. Others come from people who are more interested in flaming about problems than fixing them. Both are equally destructive and fail to address the real problem, which is fixing them. This being a volunteer-driven project, each and every one of us here is free to roll up their sleeves and fix a problem rather than simply firing off emails in all directions taking people to task for failing to do what we should be doing ourselves. Arguments about lack of time or energy also cut both ways - you can't argue that someone else should find extra time to address an issue near and dear to your heart out of one side of your mouth and then say that you yourself have no time out of the other side. The point here seems very simple. The intel NICs are on a large number of MBs and the eepro100 is the most popular card on the market. So why is there vitually no maintainer for arguably the most important driver in the freebsd tree when there are maintainers for scads of obscure, must less used cards? freebsd touts a "core team" which provides "direction"...does the "direction" include letting important drivers fall out of maintenance in favor of some crappy netgear card that chokes at 3,000pps? You seem to be rather seriously deluded about the whole open source process and I find that surprising given the length of time you've been buzzing around here. Core doesn't and cannot "demand" that some maintainer come forward or insist that something be actively maintained when there's nobody interested in doing so. Perhaps if you wanted to endow a "NIC maintainer's chair" at FreeBSD University here, we could hire someone to do it, but otherwise we're just as subject to the whims of volunteerism as you are, Dennis. Why don't you volunteer to do it? If you argue that you don't have the time or interest, then you've pretty much answered all your own questions and this entire thread is particularly pointless. - Jordan To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: if_fxp - the real point
PS: Whatever happened to all of the "support" that BSDI was going to provide? It's paid support. BSDi is a company, just like you. You want to buy a contract, we'll sell you one. Or would you just prefer to stand on the doorstep bitching in order to see yourself in print? - Jordan To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: if_fxp - the real point
They work fine, it's just the newer cards that Dennis is having problems with. I have about 10 cards using the fxp driver here now and I fully expect them to work well into the future. - Jordan To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: if_fxp - the real point
On Thu, Mar 08, 2001 at 02:48:12PM -0500, Dennis wrote: No. Keeping supported drivers up to date is part of the business of distributing an OS. Thats what "supported" implies. The driver is out of date. Noone is looking for a feature here. We just want it to work. Dennis, dear Dennis. I recently re-subbed to -hackers and one of the first posts I caught was the beginning of one of your more recent threads. Go away. I kept telling myself I wasn't going to comment, but I will. Stop attacking people. You're not contributing code, you're not contributing help, you're just out there attacking people and proclaiming you know the only direction that FreeBSD should go in. Go away. Publically blaring your vague rants is really becomming irritating. Go away. If you feel you are obligated out of some misguided sense of greater good to rant, by all means do so. However, there *ARE* some of us who aren't intimate with your fxp problems. Like me: zippy:~#dmesg|grep fxp fxp0: Intel InBusiness 10/100 Ethernet port 0xec00-0xec3f mem 0xdb00-0xdb0f,0xdb10-0xdb100fff irq 11 at device 10.0 on pci0 fxp0: Ethernet address 00:90:27:d1:83:6a Works well for me. However you rant, and then state the people who should know already know the details. You rant that this shouldn't be brought up again. Okay, so don't do it Dennis. That's fine if the people who should know already know, so why bother the other half? Go away. You've got a valid problem. Go away. As such, you must learn to properly express this problem. Go away. Perhaps you just haven't realized that people won't care what you want if you demand it in a childish way. For the majority of the fxp consumers out there, the fxp driver works just fine. Go away. You're not obligated to use FreeBSD, nor are you obligated to harass the people who spend their time working on it. If you've got a problem, open a PR, submit appropiate details, leave out the heartfelt emotion, and let those who can fix it. Go away. Or maybe you should take up kernel hacking in your spare time and put up some code. Go away. Or you could go away. - alex To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: if_fxp - the real point
On Thu, Mar 08, 2001 at 01:03:48PM -0800, Brooks Davis wrote: If it becomes a problem, the most expensive 10/100 nic you could possiably buy is less the $100 bucks so worry about it then. You've never tried to find a NuBus 100baseTX adapter have you? About $150 a pop, new. The Asante doesn't do full duplex, is based on the original SMC chipset, not sure about the only other option, the Farallon card. But you were referring to PCI cards, right? ;^) - alex To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: if_fxp - the real point
maybe commercial vendors would be willing to fund some freebsd projects if there was a positive relationship. They do, and there is. I'm continually irritated that we can't work out a better relationship with you/ETinc, since I think it'd be to our mutual benefit. You're just one of those people that we don't seem to get along with. 8( And DG has been MIA for a long time, not just recently. The last time the fxp driver was broken i found the fix and pointed him at the code. I guess I'll have to fix it this time also, as if maintaining drivers for 6 serial cards and the bwmgr isnt enough for me to do. Maybe I'll sell it this time. :-) *laugh* If you don't, please file it as a PR and beat people up until it gets committed. This is the best way to go, under the circumstances. Call BSDi (numbers on their website) and ask to speak to Gary Johnson (CEO) or Mark Garver (senior VP) and ask them yourself. If you get a useful answer, please tell the rest of us; especially me, since I burnt out trying to make it happen. Ive spoken with Mr Johnson several times. hes the biggest reason that BSDI is what it is. Amazing that hes still there. He has no concept of what the market wants. First he wanted to challenge microsoft (at similar prices) for the server market now he wants to be redhat. funny guy. If you're unhappy with the results you're getting from Gary, try calling Kirk McKusick. Keep kicking people. So what is the "relationship" that was announced? If they dont provide support or funds, what do they do? That's a Very Good Question. -- ... every activity meets with opposition, everyone who acts has his rivals and unfortunately opponents also. But not because people want to be opponents, rather because the tasks and relationships force people to take different points of view. [Dr. Fritz Todt] V I C T O R Y N O T V E N G E A N C E To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
