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Date:      Wed, 28 Nov 2001 23:27:17 EST
From:      Nyteckjobs@aol.com
To:        freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org
Cc:        freebsd-questions@freebsd.org, tedm@toybox.placo.com
Subject:   (no subject)
Message-ID:  <14e.4d05ff7.29371325@aol.com>

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>As I mentioned above, we CAN license the driver code and the DDK for
>development.  This means that you could produce FreeBSD drivers which we
>could then distribute in a binary form under a free end-user license.
>

>Frankly this is the only way I can see that FreeBSD drivers for the 5xx
>series would ever come about.  Porting SAND over, while having >advantages
>of long term support, is just overkill for this, besides which it's unlikely
>you will get a FreeBSD developer to work on GPL code.

>This would end up putting a WANic 5xx driver into the same status as the
>drivers for the Emerging Technologies, or Sangoma sync cards, which both 
>come
>with binary-only FreeBSD drivers.  It would actually have a leg up over
>those drivers because it would have Netgraph hooks and I believe that the
>Sangoma drivers don't (but I've never worked with the Sangoma cards so I
>don't know for certain)

The concept that "netgraph hooks" are a "leg up" on say, ETs drivers that 
have integrated bandwidth management and prioritization, WAN bridging 
support, load balancing and a probably 25% performance advantage is a bit 
entertaining. Unless you need to do some convoluted encapsulation netgraph 
is, aside from being appallingly non-standard to anything else in the market, 
 not much of an "advantage", and its a poster child for the trade off of 
"flexibility" versus performance.

Lets face it. If you were going to sit down and design an interface for frame 
relay, multi-protocol support, etc, you'd have to be smoking something pretty 
strong to come up with netgraph.  But its free and there is source, so it 
must be great!


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