Date: Tue, 23 Nov 1999 22:29:56 -0800 From: Mike Smith <mike@smith.net.au> To: Mikhail Teterin <mi@kot.ne.mediaone.net> Cc: Mike Smith <mike@smith.net.au>, stable@freebsd.org Subject: Re: speaking of 3.4... Message-ID: <199911240629.WAA01121@dingo.cdrom.com> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Wed, 24 Nov 1999 01:27:26 EST." <199911240627.BAA00161@rtfm.newton>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
> => Both problems are related to the majority of PC BIOSes' brain damage, > => but somehow other operating systems manage to work around the said > => damage. > > =Actually, these "other" operating systems avoid the issue by not > =offering the functionality in question at all. > > As I mentioned earlier, NT installed onto a SCSI Jazz drive and > continues to boot from it -- with two IDE disks in the way. Even though > it appears as drive J: in the diskmanager. I don't remember it EVER > having a problem counting the true memory amount, either, may be others > do. FreeBSD will do this just fine as well. In older versions, some architectural decisions that I don't agree with caused problems; these are no longer an issue. > =You remember incorrectly. The 64MB problem was licked when I managed to > =steamroller Sean and Jonathan's VM86 work into the system in order to > =use the BIOS. > > Quite possible. Or may be it was the combination of several factors? My > point was, that I was told with a very similarly convincing tones, that > it will never happen. The person also tried to explain it by saying the > FreeBSD usership is different from that of other OSes, so there is no > need to bother. *shrug* They were wrong. We rose above ourselves and fixed it. You should be happy. > =I'm not sure just why it is that the easier it is to work around a > =problem, the more people whine about it. > > No. The right question to ask is, if it is so damn easy, WHY CAN'T IT BE > AUTOMATED? It has been. I don't understand what the problem is here. It was a problem. It's been fixed. I don't have a time machine, so I can't go back and fix it for cases before I was able to do it. If you're so up and conversant with the problem, you'd understand why it gave us so much trouble and the massive discussions that were necessary to get us this far. > Perhaps you are lucky to only converse with the happy Unix > users, and simply can't imagine the rest of us, trying to convince > people to TRY. And if it does not work from the first time, they are > unlikely to try again. Perhaps you are wrong here. And perhaps you are not looking at this from the perspective of someone that's taken the extra step to address just a few of these problems. I don't get much joy out of listening to complaints about how things that have been fixed were once broken. There's this other thread going on about how we should do fewer releases, so it would take longer for these bugs to get resolved. You could go beat up on whoevers' bright idea that was. 8) > And don't try to deny it -- the growing usership IS what gives your work > and efforts sense and what gives you (and me) the satisfaction. So stop > looking down at those who point out what's missing. The questions- is > flooded with the "can't mount root" (not my observation). It is a > genuine feedback, YOU need, filtered and summarized for you... The point here is that until recently it was quite hard to deal with this case. I made it _much_ easier in 3.x to work around the basic architectural issue, before fixing it in 4.x. But making the workaround easier has just made more people complain. I can only imagine the howls of protest when the problem goes away entirely. -- \\ Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. \\ Mike Smith \\ Tell him he should learn how to fish himself, \\ msmith@freebsd.org \\ and he'll hate you for a lifetime. \\ msmith@cdrom.com To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-stable" in the body of the message
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?199911240629.WAA01121>