From owner-freebsd-questions Mon Jan 14 6:49: 7 2002 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mail8.nc.rr.com (fe8.southeast.rr.com [24.93.67.55]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 0203A37B404 for ; Mon, 14 Jan 2002 06:49:02 -0800 (PST) Received: from there ([66.57.85.154]) by mail8.nc.rr.com with Microsoft SMTPSVC(5.5.1877.687.68); Mon, 14 Jan 2002 09:18:46 -0500 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-15" From: Brian T.Schellenberger To: "Anthony Atkielski" , "FreeBSD Questions" Subject: Re: USB CF reader (SanDisk) epilog Date: Mon, 14 Jan 2002 09:18:34 -0500 X-Mailer: KMail [version 1.3] References: <002301c19b4e$6ee9b950$0a00000a@atkielski.com> <086093039220d12FE6@Mail6.nc.rr.com> <01f601c19cd0$5b65e6a0$0a00000a@atkielski.com> In-Reply-To: <01f601c19cd0$5b65e6a0$0a00000a@atkielski.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Message-ID: <034b54618140e12FE8@mail8.nc.rr.com> Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG On Monday 14 January 2002 02:52 am, Anthony Atkielski wrote: > Brian writes: > > I would say that in general FreeBSD drivers > > are worse than Windows drivers except for the > > most common hardware. > > A frightening thought, given how badly written most Windows drivers are. > Bad drivers are the leading cause of system failures on Windows machines, > and no doubt this is true for FreeBSD as well. No doubt. I've had a number of FreeBSD crashes from only semi-supported hardware or experimental or misconfigured drivers. I might be overstating the problem, though--more common on FreeBSD is to find hardware that isn't supported at all or where the driver is explicitly not supported. USB is "relatively" now on FreeBSD, though, and I don't really trust it too much myself. > > > 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. > > My experience is that almost all drivers provided by hardware manufacturers > are defective. Hardware manufacturers know their hardware, but they don't > know anything about the operating systems for which they write their > drivers, and this is dangerous when you consider that their drivers have to > run with kernel privileges. It might help if manufacturers released the > source to their drivers, but for some reason they appear to be unwilling to > do this. > > > Maybe you can do some diagnosis yourself . . . > > and then they'd work better in the future. > > With adequate documentation, I could write a driver for anything. But in > software engineering, the hardest part of writing anything is finding > enough documentation to know what to write. Most software developers are > only partially literate and hate to ever document anything. > > > CF memory has the wonderful property that it's > > not timing-dependent ... > > And yet the error I'm getting is a timeout! Well, that is odd. But it's probably because the card presents itself as a "virtual disk" and physical disks are not completely time-indepdenent, and the driver doesn't "know" that's talking to a fake disk that doesn't really have a spinning platter . . . or maybe it's higher up where the system figures if it hasn't heard from a disk drive in xx seconds it's not going to hear from it at all. Again, my experience is that Linux is the most robust O/S hardwarily speaking. Most people on the FreeBSD lists would vehemently disagree, of course. I like the design and control and everything else about FreeBSD; I now arrange things so that my hardware is "FreeBSD friendly" rather than the other way 'round so I can run FreeBSD trouble-free. -- 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 To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message