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IBM Won't Support FreeBSD On ThinkPads
BSD Today has this story about IBM refusing to deal with the fact that FreeBSD will not boot on their laptops. The actual service page is on IBM's support site. IBM does support Linux on the A20m though, but only OpenLinux. Is it my imagination or does this seem strange for a company that seems to understand the Open Source idea? Update: Seems that the problem is a BIOS issue where IBM used partition type a5 (or 165) for their suspend partition, this was reserved for 386BSD/FreeBSD/NetBSD. (NetBSD has since started using a9.) Here's a list of partition IDs as well as an explanation.
My Celerons won't overclock to 1Ghz! My car won't burn diesel! It's all a conspiracy!
"Is it my imagination or does this seem strange"
"for a company that seems to"
"understand the Open Source idea? "
Right on, AilleCat. Any time something doesn't work it's a conspiracy.
What part of "the Open Source idea" mandates that IBM commit resources to provide free technical support to ensure their laptop works with every open-source operating system?
Isn't the whole supposed advantage of open-source that when companies decide not to provide a feature or offer support for something that individual users are empowered (by possession of the source) to make it work if they really want to?
If IBM had deliberately designed the system to be incompatible, or if they refused to release technical details necessary to port to their machine, that would be one thing. But why should it be incumbent upon them to ensure that their designs are compatible with all of the open-source operating systems their users might want to use regardless of whether the pool of potential customers seeking such compatibility is big enough to purchase enough machines to offset the costs of compatibility testing and providing support?
So again: just what part of "the Open Source" idea *is* it that makes you think IBM owes you a free lunch?
This is SO easy to understand.
First off, IBM supports linux. They support RedHat and Caldera OpenLinux, officially.
This is because they have business deals with them.
Secondly, software for Linux by IBM passes a Linux compatibility testing session. All IBM Linux software works on RH, Suse, Turbolinux, and Caldera.
Third, no one ever said it would worth with FreeBSD. Fine if it does, but IBM never made any guarantees to support it. (yes, it runs on my Thinkpad 385xd without a problem. Is IBM responsible if it didn't? No.)
Why is this newsworthy, and why is it hard to understand? IBM supports opensource outside of when it serves their best ineterests only.
Anyone who says otherwise hasn't looked at what IBM has done and is doing for linux in any depth.
A host is a host from coast to coast, but no one uses a host that's close
I want IBM to maximize customer satisfaction, which will, in turn, attract more customers, which will drive up my profits even more.
Telling a customer "No, you can't run that operating system, and we won't help you restore your disk. Go away." is the surest way to drive new business away as bad word of mouth spreads.
IBM should adopt Dell's take on alternative OS's. "Install 'em. If you do it properly it should work. If it doesn't, we'll help you get your laptop back to factory specs." (i.e. System restore)
There are ways to maximize profits that don't involve fscking the customer.
the unbeliever
aim:dasubergeek99
yahoo!:blackrose91
ICQ:1741281
Political or technical issues.
Support costs are only marginally useful in the sense that they keep customers in the fold, but are not themselves actual revenue sources(excepting the big support contracts for Big Iron).
If IBM supported Linux at all, on Thinkpads, its probably more because all the techies and support people use Thinkpads with Linux, without any negative bearing on Linux, or on IBM.
For example, if this were profitable, a third party company could exist that solely offered support and service for Linux under IBM Thinkpads. Somehow, I doubt they would find the field any more profitable than IBM does, and thus, no service for Linux.
Open Source is a development and coding philosophy that allows for standing on the shoulders of giants (like Science, technically), but isn't by itself anything profitable.
Just like schematics available for a car vs technical support for a car converted to running methanol or something! I think the analogy holds ^^
Geek dating!
GPL Deconstructed
Actually there a quite a few internal Linux users (and engineers who use Linux at work) at IBM - Linux is slowly filtering into their support paradigm for notebooks and PC's.
Unfortunately very few people inside IBM (that I know of, unless they avoid the internal mailing lists) use BSD. So it's natural for them not to want to support an OS the thing was never shiped with. You can, however, go to the website for several of their laptops and PC's and see Linux support filtering in in the form of patches and RPM's for their hardware.
No offense iron-horse BSD users - it's just that nobody uses it internally, and that's how the support is filtering to the outside world.
The heat from below can burn your eyes out
The real issue here is that IBM didn't look at the assigned partition ID list before creating their partition ID. FreeBSD has been using 0xa5 for about 9 or 10 years now. It is on all the lists. This has nothing at all to do with what you are describing. Dangerously dedicated disks have the x0a5 partition on them.
So calling it compatible vs non-compatible is a bit of a miss nomer.
The problem, as others have pointed out, is only the partition ID. This has been discussed to death in the freeBSD lists. People have taken disks that have Linux on it and changed the partition ID only from linux's 0x80 to freebsd's 0xa5 and the machine becomes a brick. It is *ONLY* the partition ID.
actually you are wrong.IBM does support Linux on the thinkpads, if you read carefully you will see it says:
r od uctDisplay?prrfnbr=1907962&cntrfnbr=1&prmenbr=1&cn try=840&lang=en_US&shoptype=D
Announcement letter PSG00-365 for the T20 and PSG00-646 for the T21, state Caldera OpenLinux eDesktop 2.4 (U.S. English only) supports the T20 and T21 respectively.
And that's just the preload. They have persued support for drivers on the T series and most of the A series, and you can actually get the drivers from the vendors now.
Also check out
http://commerce.www.ibm.com/cgi-bin/ncommerce/P
There is the computer with the Linux preload.
I know that IBM is planning to do more stuff for the thinkpads and linux, but even in a big company like that, resources are limited... especially for PSG...
Even if they don't have an official support team behind an operating system, there is no reason that the laptop, which is of a standard x86 architecture, won't boot. It wasn't made clear whether installations were intentionally blocked, though I imagine they weren't, or whether it's just broken hardware that won't let you boot FreeBSD. I have to wonder what sort of design went into a laptop to make it break in such a way that makes it incompatible from a standard x86 architecture in such a way. Really, this sort of thing isn't that difficult to support.
Interested in open source engine management for your Subaru?
After all, why should they support an operating system just because it is open source, even if they "get" open source and support the philosophy of open source?
Actually, I have a better idea. How about instead of talking about how good Linux is you actually learn something about programming? How about you try to write a device driver? Oh. Here is another good one, consider just for a moment that you might be wrong about linux's superiority. Consider the word "priority." Consider that it makes more sense to the BSD camp to develop a *good* system rather than a system that is crammed full of the latest hacks for the newest hardware. Consider the possibility that your time could be better spent actually contributing to Linux, BSD, or your favorite Open Source software package instead of wasting the hard drive space on slashdot's cluster and the bandwidth it took for me and the other 80,000 people that had to load your comment. I am running FreeBSD right now on my IBM Thinkpad i1452.
Now I'm ready to be moderated down for presenting a negative point against linux.
The List of Grievances with Slashdot.
I read the FreeBSD-mobile mailing list and they seemed to have the opinion that the modern IBM laptops use 165 as the partition type for the save/restore area on the disk. 165 is the registered number reserved for FreeBSD disk partitions. And when the laptop boots it sees a really large restore partition it knows nothing about and refuses to continue.
It work's like this. IBM is amazingly big, hard to believe how big, they make, build, design, construct, develop, support an absolutley huge number of products. I believe they have offices in all but 2 or 3 countries around the world, they actually do development in something like over 100 countries. It's insane. It all works because they trust their managment and they distribute stuff.
Managment is given "ownership" over various things, the higher up the manager the more he owns. Gerstner runs the whole show, under him are a bunch of senior VPs, maybe 20 or so and the company is divided up in to divisions with a senior VP at the head of each one. Like microelectric, print, and stoarge make up the "technology division." Then those divisions are further divided up into companies and subdivisions with a junior VP running/owning each one. Those junior VPs have developement staffs with managment staffs that own various parts of the devlopment group, sometimes marketing with a staff, always sales with staff, support staffs, etc. They are all independant, and given ownership of their operations. If they run their part well then they are rewarded, if not then a new manager get's to run it and the old manager does something else of has his wings clipped or leaves.
Then there is the concept of personal business commitments, or "PBCs" to use the IBMeese. Your senior VP will set goals, like he is going to bring in $6billion and create a new revenue stream worth $1billion more than last year and develop a new line of widgets and a new brand of jujus. The junior VPs, depending on which branch they are in take on parts of those PBCs and further refine then, so Jr VP X is going to enhance last year's widget to create a new line and sell xyz more of them at q% more profit to make $250million in new revenue while maintaining what he did last year. Sometimes the more senior manager will rewrite or "adjust" the junior manager's PBCs, so if $250million isn't enough he might bump it to $400million, there is supposed to be discussion on this but we've all been in relationships with people above us and know how that goes there are some tricks though. That trickles through 4 more layers down to a developer who then commits to learn java, fix all field reported bugs in less than a week, and jack around less or something like that; and his manager has to agree to those and will change them if need be, again there is supposed to be discussion but it's usually in 1 direction; "you're going to learn java and c#." (If you play the game right, that's what happens, if you're foolish you'll get strapped with something impossible.) So there is this nice hierarchy of commitment and it's a lot like the game of telephone, your VP is focused on bucks and by the time it get's to the worker bees it's about "leveraging java" or something, each manager in between makes adjustments so that he can do what he feels is the most likely to help him meet his objectives, and there is resistence you don't want to be 4 layers down and commit to bringing in $1billion because it's not going to happen and you'll be penalized for it. To do Linux or anything new you need to have two or three consecutive layers agree that it will help them out.
So for example, my first line manager owned 5 or 6 applications and the staff who developed them, his performance was based on how well we meet our PBCs which was directly tied to the product. the performance measurement then trickles back up the chain to some senior VP who sees a number on the bottom of a ledger which is hopefully black and something as big or bigger than the one he made up 12 months earlier. If that happens then all is good and everybody get's a nice bonus in February and a big raise in March, if not then he get's pissed off and whips are cracked to find out who didn't meet their objectives and caused "the team to fail." As you can see, there is lot's of translation going on and it really does get back to the worker bees. Because they didn't leverage java or fix bugs fast enough or something the team performed poorly, so pressure is applied, they try to focus on what it is that they do well and not risk and change is slowed down by this process.
So where am I taking this train? There is a simple way to short circuit the problem, the bottom line is you're not going to sell $1billion more widgets this year becuase widgets are stupid and the market is flat and Yoyodyne in Sunnyvale is make a mojo that costs 1/10th what a widget does and does 5x more, plus it has a cool colorful case. So as the PBC trickle down affect happens, the more junior people start setting lower and lower goals for themselves, that way when the Senior VP get's pissed and starts cracking whips there is backlash. For some reason that I don't understand this works, if you say you will do 25x your manager can change it to 30x but if you say you're going to do "applepie" your manager can't really say "2applepie" and if the goals are made so that they are more easily measured then the work bee picks one that may be high but it's in his backyard and easy to achieve. The worker bees set goals like "I'm going to learn java and get to work by 10:00am every day" and he achieves those goals, with ease. His boss tries to apply pressure and he says "I learned java and I haven't been late once, in fact I've been here by 7:00 everyday. I've exceeded my goals and done my piece." and defuses the situation or softens the blow. The more popular tactic is to set goals that can't be understood (various quality assurance metrics and managment philosophy type goals are popular) or goals can't be quantified. I've had managers show me their PBCs and I couldn't understand half of them and I have a two advanced degrees...
There is also one more wildcard factor I call "the hand of God." If a senior VP get's a bug up his ass about something technical or specific, then it is done regardless of objectives, even if all his people have objectives that totally contradict it and that is usually the case. If Lou Gerstner decides that Linux is the hip thing and he wants to see it on a ThinkPad, then there is going to be a Thinkpad with "BlueHat Linux" on it and it is going to exist fast even if the Thinkpad people are all about windows. "Hand of God" is powerful in that it makes the company look fast it also has a negative affect of creating animosity. When you miss your PBC because you've been building Bluehat Linux, you're going to be pissed off and you're not going to do anything Linux for a while.
So how Linux steps in to this is kind of orthagonal. First, products are owned and if a product is to be ported, supported, etc.. then the team that owns it is going to do it. Why? because giving it to another group could potentially cause that group to fail to meet their goals or if they do then it is success that doesn't trickle up to your boss through you, the culture is to keep ahold of things until they are miserably out of date. Second, that team tries to set low goals for itself so it can achieve them and numerous times it has been shown that going cross platform is both hard to do, time consumnig, and almost never shows the kind of profit that trickles up in to the figures corporate is looking for. Then lastly becuse of the higher level ownership there are almost no parallels between products. For example, OS/2 was made by one division and PCs by another; from a consumer's point of view they go together but OS/2's success (think PBCs) has nothing to do with the PC's success because they are being measured by different metrics and realistically OS/2 would have initially hurt or been a risk for the sales of PCs the PC group wanted nothing to do with it.
Same is true with Linux. Db2 is made by one group and PCs another; Linux runs a lot of web servers and DB2 is a great database for web stuff so getting DB2 onto linux makes a lot of sense for them becuase it opens a market. On the otherhand 95+% of PCs sold run windows so to do well in that business and be part of the 95% you don't want to screw around with Linux. Never mind the fact that the PC is being sold as a server. The PC guys take bigger risk by trying to push linux when they can set modest goals (sell 5% more WindowsME PCs this year, which is actually pretty good and pretty tough to do) and achieve those with relative ease. Linux has really ended up on IBM PC hardware because of the "Hand of God" and it was done against resistence.
PowerPC is in the same boat, PowerPCs are made by microelectric which isn't anywhere near the division that PCs are in. They tried to put PowerPCs in to PCs for something like 45seconds before they dropped it because it wasn't going to be profitable. There was some HoG involvement and now the PowerPC has lost any reputation it could have possibly had with the PC people because they pissed away millions of dollars trying to make it work, it's not just a risk but they hate it because they were burned by it in the past. Don't expect to ever see IBM sell PowerPC based machines to the consumer.
It's the software / hardware rift that makes it the most complex, the success of software has nothing to do with the hardware and vice-versa. We all know they go together and even IBM knows that to some degree but when it comes time to do better than you did the year before you want more options and you don't want to take big risks. Ad because software and hardware are different divisions there isn't a lot of overlap
Don't get me completely wrong, there are cowboys in the mix and there are always going to be hackers and geeks in the fray. The most powerful tool the hacker at IBM has is skunkworks, he ports DB2 to Linux at home and then presents his managment with a new product "for free" and they will usually not turn that down. All the big press Linux items started that way, DB2, domino, S/390, etc. Good things can happen, and senior managment are always wild cards, the guy who is slated to follow Gerstner happens to be a Linux freak and so Linux has been getting a lot of pub and press but still is having trouble finding its way into core markets because it's still seen as a risk and he dictates things. The overall culture is to try to avoid risk though and that means don't change until it's too late. The PC group in particular is in an intensely competitive market and has an extremely difficult time meeting their objectives (they fail most of the time) and so getting Linux on to Thinkpads and that type of stuff isn't done unless someone from the top orders it and then it's never going to be carried on.
I couldn't tell from the page if it just won't boot to BSD because there is some incompatibility, or if IBM actually took steps to block BSD and other unsupported OS's from booting.
According to Pat, the problem is a BIOS bug in the affected laptops in booting with the specific partition type that BSD uses. Since FreeBSD is an "unsupported operating system" they refuse to make such a simple fix. Very disappointing indeed.
God Fucking Damnit
Oh, boo hoo hoo: Big Bad Blue has stolen BSDs partition number. That's really ignorant of them, and they deserve to be punished by losing sales. But for anyone who want to develop a fix, here are some ideas:
1) Patch the fsck'ing BIOS. [Dangerous on a laptop]
2) Modify the bootloader so that it re-writes the partition table on every boot using some other type. Writeback at shutdown.
3) recompile your BSD kernel to use a different filesystem type. Or really use a different type for the filesystems [but then you look one of the biggest reasons for running BSD--softupdates].
This can be gotten around. IBM has just done something stupid. They probably ought to have stolen the XENIX fs number instead!
There is a solution, though. I just put FreeBSD 4.2 on a new Dell Inspiron 5000e, and it went on nearly flawlessly. The only trouble was that X had to be compiled from CVS because the RAGE Mobility LF isn't really supported in XFree4.0.1. Of course that caveate applies to linux as well. Cardbus doesnt' work in 4.2, but does in -current. Standard PCMCIA is fine. Otherwise every single piece of hardware worked in all respects after a kernel recompile. This machine also has the famous 1600x1200 screen, and is several hundred $$$ cheaper than the equivelent IBM machine (which has a much crappier screen).
Moral of the story: If you have any desire to run FreeBSD or just want better hardware at a cheaper price, the Inspiron 5000 series is THE way to go.