Date: Mon, 03 Feb 2003 15:06:59 -0800
From: Terry Lambert <tlambert2@mindspring.com>
To: Gordon Tetlow <gordont@gnf.org>
Cc: Dag-Erling Smorgrav <des@ofug.org>, David Yeske <dyeske@yahoo.com>, hackers@freebsd.org
Subject: Re: End-Of-Life announcement for M-Systems DiskOnChip driver("fla").
Message-ID: <3E3EF613.DBA56F01@mindspring.com>
References: <20030202222042.3444.qmail@web13503.mail.yahoo.com> <xzpbs1tblxb.fsf@flood.ping.uio.no> <3E3EAF82.E0F19A11@mindspring.com> <20030203224802.GM98559@roark.gnf.org>
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Gordon Tetlow wrote: > > Why announce an intent to kill something that works? > > > > Do we just not "like" DoC, as a matter of public policy? > > I think phk has a good explaination: > > :The driver in the tree works with the M-systems devices I have to > :test with, but M-Systems have neither sent me the necessary software > :updates nor hardware samples of the latest generation of the DoC That's more or less a "blackmail the vendor" reason. If that's the intent, then I guess we'll have to see if it works. 8-). > :and I have received no emails from people who were stuck because > :of this. Or in other words: "despite these handicaps, no one is complaining that it's not working, so the lack of direct vendor support for the FreeBSD project, specifically, hasn't really damaged the ability of people to use the driver". > :Combine this with the fact that the DoC is a CPU-poll technology > :where you busy-wait for the flash devices to do their thing, rather > :than get an interrupt when they are done, I think we can safely say > :that the DoC is well past its prime time. That's a "we just don't like it" argument; I can respect not liking it, and complaining bitterly about it in the driver comments, like some of Bill Paul's infamous driver comments. FWIW: most crypto accelerators don't raise interrupts, either. It seems to be a common hardware vendor disease, to assume that the most important thing a computer can ever do is sit around waiting for their hardware to get done doing its thing, making polling it a requirement. But if that's the argument for removing it, then it's probably time to remove the ability to use non-DMA IDE drives from the ATA driver, and kill all the ethernet drivers that have alignment requirements for their DMA engines, making m_pullup copies necessary, and yanking all drivers that do destructive probes, and getting rid of the F00F workaround, and yanking all support for things hung off the floppy controller, etc. etc.. All that could be justified using exactly the same argument. -- Terry To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
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