Date: Sun, 13 Jan 2002 17:39:17 -0500 From: Brian T.Schellenberger <bts@babbleon.org> To: "Anthony Atkielski" <anthony@freebie.atkielski.com>, "FreeBSD Questions" <freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: Re: USB CF reader (SanDisk) epilog Message-ID: <086093039220d12FE6@Mail6.nc.rr.com> In-Reply-To: <01d601c19c7b$55599810$0a00000a@atkielski.com> References: <002301c19b4e$6ee9b950$0a00000a@atkielski.com> <05e5c4129170d12FE5@mail5.nc.rr.com> <01d601c19c7b$55599810$0a00000a@atkielski.com>
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On Sunday 13 January 2002 04:43 pm, Anthony Atkielski wrote:
> Brian writes:
> > If anybody ever told you that FreeBSD was
> > more reliable or better with "unusual" hardware
> > we were sold a bill of goods.
>
> I didn't know that a USB CF reader is now considered "unusual" hardware.
> If it is unusual, why does FreeBSD support it at all?
>
> > The O/S is much more stable but hardware
> > drivers consistently lag Windows.
>
> But the main problem with Windows is device drivers! If FreeBSD drivers
> are even worse, this does not reflect favorably upon the operating system.
I would say that in general FreeBSD drivers are worse than Windows drivers
except for the most common hardware. This stands to reason as the hardware
manufacturers write the drivers for Windows and/or work with Microsoft,
whereas they are generally indifferent to and often actively hostile to
freeware O/S developers.
That is to say, the drivers for the most common hardware, or the hardware
that the primary developers happen to own is superior; the less mainstream
hardware is generally worse.
That said, Linux is usually ahead of FreeBSD on hardware, mostly because the
larger installed user base. I ran FreeBSD long ago and switched to Linux for
many years due to superior hardware support; I was happy to switch back but
hardware is a weak point for FreeBSD in my experience.
Also, it's all free contribution project. Maybe you can do some diagnosis
yourself . . . and then they'd work better in the future. ktrace can be
useful; you can enable kernel debugging and even add your own tracepoints /
print statements / whatever to the kernel. CF memory has the wonderful
property that it's not timing-dependent (no platter to align or anything), so
you should be able to arbitrary amounts of debugging without affecting the
results (in theory at least).
>
> > You just have the O/S's backwards :-(
>
> I can't afford to set up a separate machine and OS for every hardware
> device I wish to use.
--
Brian T. Schellenberger . . . . . . . bts@wnt.sas.com (work)
Brian, the man from Babble-On . . . . bts@babbleon.org (personal)
http://www.babbleon.org
-------> Free Dmitry Sklyarov! (let him go home) <-----------
http://www.eff.org http://www.programming-freedom.org
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