From owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Wed Jun 21 07:18:49 2006 Return-Path: X-Original-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id C75AE16A479 for ; Wed, 21 Jun 2006 07:18:49 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from tedm@toybox.placo.com) Received: from mail.freebsd-corp-net-guide.com (mail.web-strider.com [65.75.192.90]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 3A55743D4C for ; Wed, 21 Jun 2006 07:18:49 +0000 (GMT) (envelope-from tedm@toybox.placo.com) Received: from tedwin2k (nat-rtr.freebsd-corp-net-guide.com [65.75.197.130]) by mail.freebsd-corp-net-guide.com (8.11.1/8.11.1) with SMTP id k5L7Ikx77437; Wed, 21 Jun 2006 00:18:46 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from tedm@toybox.placo.com) From: "Ted Mittelstaedt" To: "Marc G. Fournier" , Date: Wed, 21 Jun 2006 00:18:45 -0700 Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="windows-1250" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Priority: 3 (Normal) X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook IMO, Build 9.0.6604 (9.0.2911.0) In-Reply-To: <20060620060845.U1114@ganymede.hub.org> X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V6.00.2800.1807 Importance: Normal Cc: Subject: RE: Are hardware vendors starting to bail on FreeBSD ... ? X-BeenThere: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5 Precedence: list List-Id: User questions List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Wed, 21 Jun 2006 07:18:50 -0000 >-----Original Message----- >From: owner-freebsd-questions@freebsd.org >[mailto:owner-freebsd-questions@freebsd.org]On Behalf Of Marc >G. Fournier >Sent: Tuesday, June 20, 2006 2:24 AM >To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org >Subject: Are hardware vendors starting to bail on FreeBSD ... ? > > > >... and is there anything we can do as a community to prevent it? > >I've been a FreeBSD users since '94, and proud of it ... and have >vehemently defended, all the way, my decision to use it vs 'the >dark side' >... > >Although my above subject is a more "general call", my big beef >right now >is with RAID controller vendors, but I don't believe that the >problem is >specific to them, so hopefully others will ring in ... > It IS specific to them for a couple reasons, let me outline: 1) RAID is being taken over by SATA raid chipsets. Everyone knows it, and no RAID chip makers are putting money into development and support of anything other than SATA chip raid controllers. That is, their SCSI and UDMA products they are just milking right now. 2) The motherboard chipset manufacturers - like Intel - are integrating SATA RAID functionality into their motherboard sets. So companies like Promise see all their low-end business going into the toilet and they are once again, just milking it. 3) Price of disks is making everyone chuck out RAID-5 The thing to do today is get cheapo 500GB SATA drives and mirror them if you want redundancy. Instead of striping together 3 or 4 250GB or 200GB disks, just get one or two big ones if you don't care about redundancy. 4) FreeBSD needs to quit changing around the disk driver architecture. It's completely fucking rediculous. We lost a lot of good drivers due to the shift to CAM and then as soon as we got some of the popular ones back, they broke everything from the 4 to 5 transistion. Now they are doing it again from 5 to 6. Manufacturers like Intel put in their time, they wrote stuff like your storcon, and saw the FreeBSD community say "thanks, but we are going to make you rewrite it again since one of our developers got a hair up his ass to change everything around again" The vendors are getting sick of it. 5) The low-end RAID chipsets are getting absorbed into the ata driver as fast as Soren can write support for them. There's no incentive for the manufacturer to write a FreeBSD driver once we reverse engineer what they are doing and stick support in for it. > >I just read a recent thread about monitoring RAID controllers on one of >hte lists (this one?) where someone mentioned that Adaptec's Official >stand is that they don't support storage management under >FreeBSD ... but, >in ports, we have the older aaccli interface, which I >understand doesn't >work with newer controllers ... > >So, my question above, and a public call to -core, or anyone else: > > What can we, as a community, due to improve this situation? > Simple. If you want to run RAID-5 then purchase the HiPoint card or the 3ware card, both of them come with manufacturer-written drivers. 3ware is really great, they have a developer with committ rights and they just stick their driver right into the FreeBSD source repository. If you want to run RAID 0 or 1, then buy a motherboard with a SATA raid chipset that is supported in FreeBSD's driver. >Its not enough anymore to know a piece of hardware *works* with >FreeBSD, >but more that the vendor is willing to acknowledge us as a market ... >petitions don't do anything, IMHO ... it all falls to 'money talks' for >most vendors (not all of them, but alot of them) ... > >Is there anything we can do? > Yes, reward the vendors like HiPoint and 3ware by purchasing their product, punish the vendors like Promise that force us to reverse engineer their product to write a driver for it by not buying their product. Red