Date: Sat, 10 Feb 1996 23:04:40 -0800 From: Jake Hamby <jehamby@lightside.com> To: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com> Cc: hackers@FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: Manuel Bouyer: update of atapi driver Message-ID: <311D9508.280D@lightside.com> References: <29434.824001055@time.cdrom.com>
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Jordan K. Hubbard wrote:
>
> I would like to campaign for adopting the NetBSD ATAPI driver and
> throwing ours away. This doesn't come down to any technical
> comparison between the two, simply the fact that NetBSD's driver
> appears to be far more actively maintained. The 5 or 6 bug reports
> and generate "status? help?" queries I've sent to Serge Vakulenko,
> <vak@cronyx.ru> since 2.1 was released have gone completely
> unanswered, and I can only conclude that he's abandoned it.
>
> This is bad, since it needs a lot more work and ATAPI CDROM is
> probably one of the most popular types at this point. I would far
> prefer to start over with a driver that looks like it's actually going
> to be supported if nobody cares to step in and fill the shoes that
> Serge has vacated and support our own!
>
> Comments?
>
> Jordan
Go for it! Although Serge's ATAPI driver was usable for me when I built
a custom kernel, as I'm sure you remember, none of the ATAPI boot
floppies you made for the 2.1.0 SNAPs and RELEASE ever did work for me!
If NetBSD's ATAPI driver works with more brands of CD-ROM drives, is
stable, and does not interfere with any IDE hard drives (even old ones),
and we can get back to having a single GENERIC kernel, I vote yes! Also,
I should note that the Workman port never did work with our ATAPI driver
(does it work with Mitsumi or Sony, or are there SCSI-specific
assumptions in there?).
Anyway, if this isn't too much work to integrate with FreeBSD, go for it!
By the way, why don't we go one step further and take NetBSD's IDE driver
too? After all, IDE and ATAPI are tightly integrated. Does anyone know
if NetBSD/i386's IDE driver is any better/faster/more stable than ours?
(Typing this from Netscape Mail from Windows NT Beta 4.0... Imagine, all
the slowness of the Win95 UI combined with the RAM requirements of NT! I
should say that I really do like NT, but I have 24MB of RAM. FreeBSD is
MUCH nicer, even with RAM hogs like Netscape and Emacs, on an 8MB system,
whereas NT is unusable.. Anyway, just be thankful I'm not using
Microsoft Internet Mail (motto: SMTP? What's that?) :-)
--
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Jake Hamby | E-Mail:
jehamby@lightside.com
Student, Cal Poly University, Pomona | System Administrator, JPL
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