In message <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, Austin Murphy writes: > > The proper docs are available at: ftp://ftp.hifn.com/. The problem is > these docs only came out late last year, AFTER the OpenBSD people made > a big issue out of it. At the time this seemed to meet the needs of > the OpenBSD developers.
Access is not easy, only "anonymous" (not "ftp") login works: $ ftp ftp.hifn.com Connected to ftp.hifn.com. 220 Hifn Anonymous FTP Site Name (ftp.hifn.com:sobrado): ftp 331 Password required for ftp. Password: 530 Not logged in. ftp: Login failed. ftp> user anonymous 331 Password required for anonymous. Password: 230 Login OK. Proceed. Indeed, access to these docs should help developers. > The "fix" for FreeBSD is a totally different project. Michael > Richardson of Xelerance was hired by Hifn to make a working software > stack for Linux and FreeBSD for the hifn chips. I think this started a > year ago, well before the OpenBSD v. HiFn standoff. > http://www.xelerance.com/pr/20070205/ > > It looks like there is a little howto info at: http://hifn.xelerance.com/. > > At any rate, it looks like progress is being made so I'm hopeful that > good drivers will be available in the not too distant future. If they know where the problem is, why not just release a patch (not a driver) under the same licensing terms as the OpenBSD driver? (probably an ISC license, I have not looked at the source code) Closed binary drivers (blobs) cannot be audited, code quality cannot be improved, and there is a real risk of the driver become unmaintained in the future. A driver whose source code can be integrated in the operating system cvs repository will be maintained, improved and fixed for decades. Hifn does not sell software (at least, they do not sell the driver); they sell hardware. So, there is not a revenue loss in helping the OpenBSD developers to find where the problem is. In fact, it will be easier for Hifn to help developers to fix the driver and delegate on them for the maintenance of the driver (that will be probably ported to FreeBSD and NetBSD too). Cheers, Igor. _______________________________________________ Soekris-tech mailing list [email protected] http://lists.soekris.com/mailman/listinfo/soekris-tech
