*BSD News Article 67963


Return to BSD News archive

Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!news.rmit.EDU.AU!news.unimelb.EDU.AU!munnari.OZ.AU!ihnp4.ucsd.edu!agate!nickkral
From: nickkral@america.CS.Berkeley.EDU (Nick Kralevich)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Re: Linux vs. FreeBSD ...
Date: 8 May 1996 08:25:21 GMT
Organization: Electrical Engineering Computer Science Department, University of California at Berkeley
Lines: 48
Message-ID: <4mplph$n1s@agate.berkeley.edu>
References: <3188C1E2.45AE@onramp.net> <318FD68B.60AD12F6@lambert.org> <4mouan$cpb@agate.berkeley.edu> <4mpch5$97t@ennui.ops.best.com>
NNTP-Posting-Host: america.cs.berkeley.edu

In article <4mpch5$97t@ennui.ops.best.com>,
Ron Echeverri <rone@ennui.ops.best.com> wrote:
>>Terry Lambert  <terry@lambert.org> wrote:
>>>Again, your choice to buy the hardware.
>>That's not much consolation to a user who happens to have a non-working
>>(under FreeBSD) CD-ROM drive that they can get easially working under 
>>Linux.
>If an operating system allows me to use hardware that is broken, that makes
>the operating system suspect in my book.

There is a distinction between hardware BUGS and BROKEN hardware.
I am not talking about broken hardware (such as bad SIMMS), but rather,
I am talking about are BUGS in hardware, such as the [1] RZ1000 chipset 
bug, the CMD640 chipset bug, or the Pentium bug [2], which affect a wide 
number of people. 

 [1] RZ1000 bug: http://pentium.intel.com/procs/support/rz1000/rztest.htm
 [2] Linux software patches for these two chipsets and the pentium bug have 
     been incorporated into the main Linux kernel.  Are patches available 
     for FreeBSD?

Hardware BUGS can be considered "environment problems", and if they can 
be worked around, they should.  

According to Terry, 3 out of 5 EIDE interfaces have bugs.  If the 
FreeBSD core team is going to take the moral high ground and not try to 
work around those bugs ("it's a hardware problem, let the hardware guys 
fix it"), then I'm sure the Linux community would be more than happy to 
help out those users.

Of course, if they DO work around those bugs, then, by your definition,
they are a "suspect" operating system.

Oh well.  I guess it's a no win situation.  *sigh*  In that case,
I'll stick with the "suspect" operating system.  I would rather have
somthing that works then listen to people make excuses for somthing that 
doesn't work.

I am not saying that it is OK for hardware to have bugs, but rather,
that an operating system should try to help out the unfortunate user 
who gets stuck with the buggy hardware.  The answer "[it was] 
your choice to buy the hardware" isn't exactly encouraging when 
the operating system can (and should) work around the problem.

Take care,
-- Nick Kralevich
   nickkral@cory.eecs.berkeley.edu