OpenBSD Clashes with Adaptec In Quest for Docs 367
TrumpetPower! writes "OpenBSD developers have been asking for documentation from Adaptec for over four months. Adaptec's response has been to deliberately misunderstand what is being asked of them. A former Adaptec employee admits that the hardware is buggy and tricky to get right. So, as a result, OpenBSD 3.7 will ship without Adaptec RAID support. Personally, I'm glad that Theo isn't resting on his laurels."
Just a note (Score:5, Informative)
I have not been using OpenBSD sice 1999, but hardware support was never its strong point... though what it supported was,like all the BSD's, supported extremely well.
It's a good call, in spirit of BSD. Scott's drivers are exellent and they just need to port those.
Re:How many people... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:How many people... (Score:5, Informative)
It did not start with BSD4.4-lite, go to 386BSD, move to NetBSD, then OpenBSD, then DragonFlyBSD and then FreeBSD. Each are their own system which split at one time or another from the same tree.
All four of those systems are maintained today and therefore it is not like Windows 9x complaining about hardware support. Windows does not maintain new versions of Windows 95.
OpenBSD is the extremely secure and extremely open of the BSDs and Unix-likes. OpenBSD refuses to have anything that isn't as Free and Open as their goals describe into their system. Linux and FreeBSD are more into the functionality over ideals idea. NetBSD I cannot speak for though as I don't really follow them.
Re:Simple solution... (Score:2, Informative)
This is how we are supposed to "vote with our money" as "consumers". Yes, I know, it'll never have any effect anyway, but that still dont make it a troll.
reminds me of Promise (Score:5, Informative)
Reminds me of Promise's definition of "Linux support" for a card I bought.
In the case of the SX-150 SATA raid card (which has a hardware XOR engine and whatnot), that meant "we have binary drivers for distributions which are several years old".
There is some source. Well, it's a 'wrapped' binary driver, and it's only available from "some guy" in Germany who begged Promise support long enough they gave it to him. You a)cannot compile it into the kernel b)cannot compile it for 2.6 because it simply isn't compatible. I sent numerous emails to Promise asking when a 2.6 driver would be available or if there was any updated source code. None were ever answered.
Same story with the tools- unless you're running Redhat 9.0 or some ancient version of Suse, forget ANY on-line monitoring.
Not that the customers are much better- one page I found about the card suggested that "software raid is faster anyway", which is an absurd proposition by itself. Regardless, why would you spend $100-200 more on a hardware-raid card complete with cache memory, and then just use the 2.6 SATA driver which only drives the SATA interfaces?
From what I understand, 3ware has better support for Linux, but that means I have to migrate a large amount of data off the old array..
Re:Why just documentation? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:reminds me of Promise (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Just a note (Score:5, Informative)
The management utility in the FreeBSD ports tree is binary-only. OpenBSD refuse to accept binary only crap, which is why they want this documentation.
Re:How many people... (Score:4, Informative)
The only exception is firmware binary blobs (which all OSes need, as it is not practical to create open source replacements), they are tolerated if they are released under a license that allows OpenBSD to distribute them.
That's similar to what Linuxes like Debian demand, and that's a lot more than Linuxes like Red Hat and Suse demand.
Re:reminds me of Promise (Score:3, Informative)
I had similar troubles with my Promise Fasttrack 100 TX2, which afaik is just a standard ATA disk controller with the capability to label drives as being part of certain arrays. The raid stuff is then done in software.
Anyway, Linux support for this has been patchy. There was a native driver in 2.4 for some time, which worked on-and-off. There was also a source-wrapped binary driver, available from the Promise site, which worked occasionally under 2.4, but is incompatible with 2.6. I assume Promise have no intention of supporting this card under 2.6, since I haven't seen a new driver for quite some time now.
However, all is not lost! This morning I discovered dmraid [redhat.com], which uses Linux's software raid implementation to make cards like this work. If you run Gentoo, there is an option for genkernel that will build dmraid into the initrd, which auto-discovers the raid arrays on boot. Magic!
So, despite Promise's dismal lack of support, their cards can be quite functional. I'm not sure I'd get another one though - I'd at least try and find a manufacturer that provides decent linux drivers first.
Re:Why just documentation? (Score:5, Informative)
If we accept the claims made in the article, Adaptec won't even release the technical information necessary for people to write their own. That's what the argument is about.
Actually, nobody seems to expect that. Unquestionably a fair number of people would be happy if it happened, but nobody expects it. What people do expect is for Adaptec to release comprehensive technical specifications for their cards to interested parties, a practice that used to be commonplace among hardware makers but has been in lamentable decline for some time now. Releasing the tech specs would benefit not only OpenBSD developers but Linux, FreeBSD, MacOS, and others, and while your assertion is correct that Windows has a >90% market share on the desktop, it's somewhat of a non-sequitur considering we're talking about drivers for a RAID controller that's more likely to go into a server machine. Windows still dominates in that market, as well, but not to the extent that it does on the desktop. By releasing the necessary specs and letting the open source community write drivers that work with their hardware Adaptec could, at very little cost to themselves, expand their potential customer base by 10-20%. Why won't they?
Slightly FUD (Score:4, Informative)
What the Adaptec guy actually said was:Using the word "buggy" like it was used in the Slashdot front page article implies that the cards are flaky and that non-Adaptec cards aren't (as) buggy. This isn't outright stated, but similarly saying something like "I don't use Microsoft Office because it is buggy" tends to leave the listener with the impression that other office suites are less buggy, even though that isn't stated outright.
The Adaptec employee stated only what we already know--that different revisions of firmware have different bugs (in ALL products that use firmware, not just Adaptec RAID adapters), and that they must be worked around. If different revisions of firmware didn't have bugs, then different revisions of firmware wouldn't exist--the first one would have worked fine (aside from occasional feature additions and tweaks).
However, to the original poster's credit, Adaptec RAID cards really do suck, and they really are buggy (not to mention slow, especially in RAID 5, compared to almost every other brand--and Adaptec's entire SCSI line is pretty consistant in that regard), but that is beside the point. Slashdot shouldn't participate in the same FUD that we so often criticize--just let the facts speak for themselves, and leave the interpretation up to the reader.
Re:Why just documentation? (Score:5, Informative)
And how else do you propose to effect change? Shut and sit down isn't going to work is it?
Whining, boycotting, shaming, humiliating, mocking, deriding, bitching and moaning is a perfectly appropriate response to an idiot company acting in stupid ways.
More people need to get uppity. Sitting quietly at your desk doing exactly what you are told isn't going to get you anywhere.
Yes, he is wrong. (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Why just documentation? (Score:3, Informative)
OK, that's fine. So customers running BSD will not purchase Adaptec RAID hardware until late-2006. Any earlier, and they'd run into problems with it being unsupported by their OS vendor.
"The OpenBSD guys response was "Can't you read! I want documentation NOW or I'm going to take my OS and go home."
Specifically, they say that if they don't know how to create software that works with Adaptec RAID, then they won't write software that works with Adaptec RAID. Sounds entirely plausible to me. Would you fancy writing a windows driver if you didn't have MSDN, SDK or API-reference?
Re:Why just documentation? (Score:1, Informative)
and i'm not using openbsd.
used adaptec cards under windows, mac, and linux.
enough is enough. i said goodbye to adaptec years ago...it was the best move i've ever made.
Re:Why just documentation? (Score:2, Informative)
Apparantly, they do not have access to the documentation, because it does not exist. All they have is the source code. I can't find a link to theo's post but here is what he said:
I have received information from a few sources that indicates that Adaptec does not have documentation on their management interface in-house. They only have a source-code implimentation, for a variety of models. So that is perhaps why they are so slow. That does however speak rather badly. I have not encountered a vendor without even internal documentation for their products in quite a while. Companies you've probably rarely heard of like Zydas, Atmel, Symbol have documentation for their wireless chipsets. The Adaptec SCSI chipset documentation that we dragged out of Adaptec about 8 years ago or so was 12 books. I hope this is not true. Any ex-Adaptec employees want to set the record straight (and please tell the truth..)
Re:Just a few thoughts (Score:2, Informative)
Rude? After 4 months of waiting? I'd sure hell be rude too. Look, I once had the powersupply of an LCD monitor break after 2 weeks of usage. I returned it to the shop. I called them form time to time to hear if the powersupply was there yet (technically they should call me, but after a month you get suspicious). They always told me the same "Hasn't returned from Sony Brussels yet". After *six* months of waiting (I still can't believe I waited that long), I went to the shop, slammed my fist on the counter and yelled out loud that they are *NOW* going to give me my powersupply back because I was waiting for *SIX MONTHS*. Guess, how fast they were to give me a replacement powersupply by opening another box of an identical model LCD-screen. Oh, and I can assure you that I must have added some "Fucks" and "Shits" left and right in my rant.
Note that this was back in the day that a 15" LCD screen cost about 1200€. To this day, I can't understand why I waited *six months* before complaining loudly. The LCD screen is still in use on my primary desktop.
So, rudeness becomes very relative if you consider the time waited.
Re:Why just documentation? (Score:3, Informative)