Date: Sat, 25 Mar 2000 14:59:24 +0900 From: "Daniel C. Sobral" <dcs@newsguy.com> To: Conrad Sabatier <conrads@home.com> Cc: stable@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: What does "Voxware still supported in 4.0" mean exactly? Message-ID: <38DC55BC.BA2240C2@newsguy.com> References: <XFMail.000324152208.conrads@home.com>
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If you will allow me, I'll explain the issues here.
Conrad Sabatier wrote:
>
> I smell shades of M$ here. :-)
>
> Seriously, isn't that one of the chief criticisms of Microsoft, that every
> time they release a new version of Windows, you have to plunk down for
> {more,better,faster,newer,bigger} hardware in order to make the best use
> of it?
FreeBSD has always been infamous for picky hardware support. It's not a
matter for more/better/faster/newer/bigger so much as this-or-nothing.
This is a simple case of developer base. We have *one* person actively
working on sound support, aside from japanese developers (which,
unfortunately, are quite insular). Whatever HE spends time writing a
driver for, that's what we support (support, as in _actively_).
Now, on to existing support & Voxware stuff...
> Despite this frequently noted complaint, the fact remains that Windows
> still continues to work with much older hardware. Why shouldn't FreeBSD?
Because we are evolving. Instead of burdening the OS with tons of older
systems and interfaces that are not being actively maintened and would
only:
a) waste developer's time or
b) bit-rot, resulting in some nasty remarks the first time someone
stumbles on a bug
besides increasing kernel size, and possibly making it impossible to
speed up certain things or even adopt some new hardware standards, we
simply *dump* the old interfaces. Whatever is being _actively_
supported, gets rewritten for the new interface. Whatever isn't, stop
being supported at all.
There is no way to be lean and mean and keep 10 years old interfaces
that have long stopped being used in active development at the same
time, sorry. And one thing we *DO* want is to be lean and mean.
> One particularly worrisome note (well, to me, anyway) that appeared in this
> thread mentioned the requirement to use "options OLD_ISA" (or something
> like that) to get Voxware to work in 4.0/CURRENT. Is support for older,
> pure ISA machines going away, too?
No, Voxware is NOT being dropped on 4.0, and NO ONE ever said so. I have
been reading this thread, and NOT A SINGLE TIME a committer said so.
That said, it is quite possible that Voxware will stop being supported
on 5.0-current in a short time.
Now... you see that "OLD_ISA" up there? That's not a statement about
ISA, it's about the kernel interface for ISA device drivers. We have
been replacing our device driver interface with what we call "newbus".
Newbus is _necessary_ to support some newer hardware.
For 4.0, some compatibility interfaces were created so that drivers that
were not converted continued to work. This compatibility interface is
what OLD_ISA refers to. This was over a year ago. Some drivers were not
converted in _all this time_, because _no one is working on them_. That
includes Voxware.
Notice, though, that Voxware is still working, to some extent. We have
not yet completely removed support for the old interfaces, we have just
made as much noise as possible about it, so that anyone who still cares
about these drivers will feel compelled to actually work on them to
bring them up to date.
What we cannot do is stop FreeBSD development just because no one care
enough about Voxware to keep it up to date (well, no one with the
necessary skills, granted).
And, then, there is all the complain about Voxware on 4.0 and the
infamour "pnp" userconfig statements. Come on, guys, that was one of the
most shameful things we had. Magic incantations one had to enter at boot
to get one's sound card working, and which could only be found through
careful tumbing through ancient tomes and mailing list archives. It was
ridiculous to the point that a non-PnP device was easier to configure
than a PnP one!
Well, 4.0 does the right stuff: if you have PnP devices, it *recognizes
them*, and configures the driver automatically. Only the driver has to
use the new interface, which *supports* such behavior. That's one of the
reasons we evolved so: that you'll never have to configure a PnP device
by hand. Of course, Voxware won't understand this, unless someone port
it to the newer interfaces.
Voxware is dying because NO ONE IS SUPPORTING IT. We are not killing it
on purpose. It's just a casualty of evolution.
> Granted, sooner or later there comes a time in the life of every OS when
> support for certain types of dinosaur hardware is finally abandoned, but I
> hardly think the AWE boards could properly be described as ancient,
> outdated, or seldom used anymore.
Unfortunately, the AWE boards are not competing with other sound cards.
They are competing with AMI MegaRaid SCSI controllers, with Alpha-based
architectures, with PCMCIA and CardBUS and USB. *THAT'S* what's killing
AWE: the new hardware standards we are supporting. Heck, even PnP in a
decent way, instead of the nasty hack used on 3.x. It's just an
unfortunate coincidence that the only driver supporting the AWE
wavetable MIDI synthetizing happens to be a driver for which no active
developer exists. If a driver has no developers...
> While I can certainly appreciate the FreeBSD development team's desire for
> a more modern, unified and well-integrated driver than Voxware, until such
> time as it can provide the same functionality as the older driver, I do
> strongly believe that Voxware should continue to be supported, and that
> pcm still should be considered as an "experimental" option only.
Yeah, well, you are right. Wait just a second while I remove support for
Alpha and USB....
> In addition, I really would like to see user control over PnP devices (via
> the pnp boot config command) brought back. It's just way too useful a
> thing to throw away altogether.
There is nothing useful about it. That's not how PnP devices are
supposed to work.
--
Daniel C. Sobral (8-DCS)
dcs@newsguy.com
dcs@freebsd.org
capo@zurichgnomes.bsdconspiracy.net
One Unix to rule them all, One Resolver to find them,
One IP to bring them all and in the zone bind them.
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