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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."
When the hardware vendors will release all the specifications of their hardware to the OpenSource teams? It's so difficult to do so?
"I'll not release my documentation because others business can get all of my secrets and my bugged harware."
http://www.michel.eti.br
I know that when I'm buying hardware, I first make sure that there's at least a reasonable chance that it will work in my operating system (Linux, by choice). So, in this case, if I was choosing a RAID card, and my system was BSD-based, then Adaptec would be down a few quid.
Like their old AAA ide raid controllers which was nothing more than IDE paddle boards with software raid logic..marketed as true hardware raid.. Documentation exposes the magic behind the illusion..(sometimes)
Theo says: "We are not asking for support. We are asking for documentation."
Substitute "They" for "We" in that sentence and it could have been me speaking, when I was working at Adaptec and trying to release an in-house version of the starfire (a.k.a. "Duralan" ethernet MAC) driver. I hit that same brick wall over and over again while tying to get some chip specs and a linux driver released. Somehow, in their minds, "support" is translated into not releasing specs and drivers. Releasing such information, in contrast, is a failure to support customers. This wierd Orwellian doublethink seems to pervade the thinking of everyone connected with supporting Linux and other free OS's at Adaptec.
It's so amazing to see that nothing has changed at Adaptec in the last 7 years. My own driver episode was "resolved" (unsatisfactorily, for me) by Donald Becker agreeing to sign an NDA for the chip specs. Not to second guess Donald, but my thinking at the time was, "this just postpones the problem. Maybe it would be better just to boycott these imbeciles."
Not to close on a sour note, I should say that Adaptec was a great place to work in many ways, and I always viewed their attitude toward free software as an aberration. I still tend to do so, and perhaps that's wishful thinking on my part.
* To: Charles Swiger
...deliberately breaking OpenBSD's support for Adaptec hardware as some
* Subject: Re: Adaptec AAC raid support
* From: Bob Beck
* Date: Sat, 19 Mar 2005 13:56:41 -0700
* Cc: Theo de Raadt , Sean Hafeez , misc@openbsd.org, Scott Long , freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
* In-reply-to:
* Mail-followup-to: Charles Swiger , Theo de Raadt , Sean Hafeez , misc@openbsd.org, Scott Long , freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
* References:
* User-agent: Mutt/1.5.6i
>
> sort of ultimatum is a childish and self-destructive action. I hope
> the other OpenBSD committers veto any such action as being
> counterproductive and harmful to your users.
Horsecookies. What was done was remove AAC support from GENERIC,
because users know what is in GENERIC is supposed to be stable and a
good candidate for use. I've got AAC's. They aren't at the moment.
they die, and you can't do anything with the raid management without
rebooting, and Adaptec has shown no signs of releasing documentation
so that situation can be corrected.
Sure, there's a "free" driver, and a non-free management interface,
so it's only half a driver. Pretending to have a production system
using a raid card that with no supportable management interface so you
have to reboot to fix anything is like buying birth control pills in
packs of 20. Pretty soon you're going to take a good fucking on a day
you really can't afford it. Period.
As such AAC isnt' any more broken than it ever was. OpenBSD
just chooses not to encourage users to purchase a non-supportable
card by including support for it in the GENERIC kernel. Are you
saying it's more honest to leave unstable and incomplete support in
there? People who wish to use it anyway can always compile it in.
> Otherwise, you're likely to discover that most people choose to run an
> OS which works with the hardware they have, rather than sticking with
> OpenBSD.
Or choose to replace the hardware that isn't supportable by the
OS they want to run. Thank you LSI and Dell. LSI cards seem to work
fine.
-Bob
emphasis added by poster
That's Hanlon's razor, actually, which (most likely) predates Napoleon.
quidquid latine dictum sit altum videtur.
- "write drivers for the niche 5% MacOS X or 5% other *nix market?
What you fail to take into account is that Adaptec RAID 5 controllers are a niche market meant for either hardcore users who need a RAID 5 array for storage, or for servers. To take an entire segment out of that niche and say "We don't want this business" is ludicrous.Last time I checked, OpenBSD is a decent sized segment of the server "niche market." Yes, it is a niche within a niche, but the PR implications of NOT providing documentation is huge, thanks to Slashdot.
This is what the topic is about -- the documentation requested is required to hotswap a failed drive, then rebuilt the array without needing to go into the BIOS and reboot. From what I read, other operating systems (ie: Windows) drivers have the ability to rebuilt the array without a reboot -- this is a huge feature required for many corporate and enterprise class servers.
I choose to vote for Open Source friendly companies with my dollars, and the influence I have on the dollars that my company will spend.
As I'm sure other people have rebutted, all they want is documentation -- Adaptec has a choice, they can choose either paying some $50 shipping and printing out a box of papers, or potentially a huge PR smear that would convince more than a few people to not buy their products.
End rant.
http://www.fsckin.com/