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OpenBSD Clashes with Adaptec In Quest for Docs
TrumpetPower! writes "OpenBSD developers have been asking for documentation from Adaptec for over four months. Adaptec's response has been to deliberately misunderstand what is being asked of them. A former Adaptec employee admits that the hardware is buggy and tricky to get right. So, as a result, OpenBSD 3.7 will ship without Adaptec RAID support. Personally, I'm glad that Theo isn't resting on his laurels."
Just a note; the "former Adaptec employee" is Scott Long of the FreeBSD project.
I have not been using OpenBSD sice 1999, but hardware support was never its strong point... though what it supported was,like all the BSD's, supported extremely well.
It's a good call, in spirit of BSD. Scott's drivers are exellent and they just need to port those.
Software RAID *is* very often faster, especially on a modern CPU paired with an older design -- you don't buy HW RAID because it is faster, you buy it for battery backup and offloading of low level operations to conserve CPU time and bus/memory bandwidth for user applications and so that if your OS or CPU/memory/whatever blows up, or you lose power, it won't corrupt the data on your disk array. Hardware RAID dedicated processors are simple, slow, "reliable" units -- not ultra-fast bleeding-edge dedicated units like you see on video cards.
If we accept the claims made in the article, Adaptec won't even release the technical information necessary for people to write their own. That's what the argument is about.
Actually, nobody seems to expect that. Unquestionably a fair number of people would be happy if it happened, but nobody expects it. What people do expect is for Adaptec to release comprehensive technical specifications for their cards to interested parties, a practice that used to be commonplace among hardware makers but has been in lamentable decline for some time now. Releasing the tech specs would benefit not only OpenBSD developers but Linux, FreeBSD, MacOS, and others, and while your assertion is correct that Windows has a >90% market share on the desktop, it's somewhat of a non-sequitur considering we're talking about drivers for a RAID controller that's more likely to go into a server machine. Windows still dominates in that market, as well, but not to the extent that it does on the desktop. By releasing the necessary specs and letting the open source community write drivers that work with their hardware Adaptec could, at very little cost to themselves, expand their potential customer base by 10-20%. Why won't they?
"Its their decision and people shouldn't begin to whine when they don't get their way."
And how else do you propose to effect change? Shut and sit down isn't going to work is it?
Whining, boycotting, shaming, humiliating, mocking, deriding, bitching and moaning is a perfectly appropriate response to an idiot company acting in stupid ways.
More people need to get uppity. Sitting quietly at your desk doing exactly what you are told isn't going to get you anywhere.
evil is as evil does