Date: Sat, 25 May 1996 12:39:34 -0400 From: dennis@etinc.com (Dennis) To: Andrew McRae <amcrae@cisco.com> Cc: hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: The view from here (was Re: ISDN Compression Load on CPU) Message-ID: <199605251639.MAA04670@etinc.com>
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amcrae@cisco.com writes... >I have also looked at the FreeBSD code, and written some of it. >The biggest problem with FreeBSD is not the software, but the >crappy hardware - and I don't just mean badly designed or >badly made, but the architecture is somewhat lacking. >It seems to be getting better with PCI, and PCI >is also a technology that cisco is using for their own I/O >adaptors. But even then, we use a different connector, and have >extra pins so that hot swap can be supported. And even then >we are pushing the technology to its limit. > >Saying that cisco engineers write better code is a specious >argument, and totally ignores the hardware area. Again, *I* >know, because I work with cisco hardware engineers every day, >and I know the effort that goes into *both* hardware and >software to make products viable. I couldnt disagree more with you. Certainly there are benefits to custom hardware, but the bottom line is that hardware is either defective or not. Novell has figured out how to make PCs run forever...it not only can be done it has been done. As for hot swap, we've been selling cards for 8 years and i can count on one hand the number of boards that died in a box in the first 3 years in the field . Virtually all of the failures are some lightning event that trashed an unprotected machine or some banana pulling the card out while it was on (perhaps hoping for "hot swap"). It just doesnt happen enough to justify the price, unless your cards are flakey or run too hot. I remember a scenario a while back while at NYNEX, a company called Stratacom was peddling fully redundant CPU systems that we were considering for an accounting application. The price was about 220% of the vax's we were using at the time. We couldnt come up with a scenario which justified buying the stracom instead of 2 complete redundant vax systems. While the stratacoms were really neat and technically impressive, they just didnt give us the bang for the buck that we needed, as with the vax we could use the second one for development, testing and backup. The difference there was that if you lose 2 minutes of billing data it was gone forever. With the internet you just ruffle some feathers. Dennis ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Emerging Technologies, Inc. http://www.etinc.com Synchronous Communications Cards and Routers For Discriminating Tastes. 56k to T1 and beyond. Frame Relay, PPP, HDLC, and X.25 for BSD/OS, FreeBSD and LINUX
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