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."
The Battle with OpenSource (Score:4, Interesting)
"I'll not release my documentation because others business can get all of my secrets and my bugged harware."
I wonder how this will affect Adaptec? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:How many people... (Score:4, Interesting)
Theo is a belligerent prick so he gets noticed more than the others, but every open source OS has identical problems with driver support. Why do you think Theo got that award when he and Stallman don't exactly see eye-to-eye?
Probably software raid (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:How many people... (Score:3, Interesting)
All free OSes combined don't really add up to that much market share for many of these hardware devices. The fact is we don't have enough pull to demand most of the time (RAID controllers might be an exception).
Nothing ever changes at Adaptec (Score:5, Interesting)
Substitute "They" for "We" in that sentence and it could have been me speaking, when I was working at Adaptec and trying to release an in-house version of the starfire (a.k.a. "Duralan" ethernet MAC) driver. I hit that same brick wall over and over again while tying to get some chip specs and a linux driver released. Somehow, in their minds, "support" is translated into not releasing specs and drivers. Releasing such information, in contrast, is a failure to support customers. This wierd Orwellian doublethink seems to pervade the thinking of everyone connected with supporting Linux and other free OS's at Adaptec.
It's so amazing to see that nothing has changed at Adaptec in the last 7 years. My own driver episode was "resolved" (unsatisfactorily, for me) by Donald Becker agreeing to sign an NDA for the chip specs. Not to second guess Donald, but my thinking at the time was, "this just postpones the problem. Maybe it would be better just to boycott these imbeciles."
Not to close on a sour note, I should say that Adaptec was a great place to work in many ways, and I always viewed their attitude toward free software as an aberration. I still tend to do so, and perhaps that's wishful thinking on my part.
Re:Use IBM RAID (Score:1, Interesting)
At least they are consistent (Score:2, Interesting)
LSI (Score:4, Interesting)
(OK, so not directly related to Adaptec - but it seems to be a reasonable place to give their competitor a pat on the back!).
Re:Why just documentation? (Score:1, Interesting)
Yes they do. They have an obligation to thier stock holders to sell as many units as they can. This is a foolish move on Adaptec's part and stock holders should be pissed at them turning thier backs on millions in sales.
interesting if not down right funny thread: (Score:5, Interesting)
* Subject: Re: Adaptec AAC raid support
* From: Bob Beck
* Date: Sat, 19 Mar 2005 13:56:41 -0700
* Cc: Theo de Raadt , Sean Hafeez , misc@openbsd.org, Scott Long , freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
* In-reply-to:
* Mail-followup-to: Charles Swiger , Theo de Raadt , Sean Hafeez , misc@openbsd.org, Scott Long , freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
* References:
* User-agent: Mutt/1.5.6i
>
> sort of ultimatum is a childish and self-destructive action. I hope
> the other OpenBSD committers veto any such action as being
> counterproductive and harmful to your users.
Horsecookies. What was done was remove AAC support from GENERIC,
because users know what is in GENERIC is supposed to be stable and a
good candidate for use. I've got AAC's. They aren't at the moment.
they die, and you can't do anything with the raid management without
rebooting, and Adaptec has shown no signs of releasing documentation
so that situation can be corrected.
Sure, there's a "free" driver, and a non-free management interface,
so it's only half a driver. Pretending to have a production system
using a raid card that with no supportable management interface so you
have to reboot to fix anything is like buying birth control pills in
packs of 20. Pretty soon you're going to take a good fucking on a day
you really can't afford it. Period.
As such AAC isnt' any more broken than it ever was. OpenBSD
just chooses not to encourage users to purchase a non-supportable
card by including support for it in the GENERIC kernel. Are you
saying it's more honest to leave unstable and incomplete support in
there? People who wish to use it anyway can always compile it in.
> Otherwise, you're likely to discover that most people choose to run an
> OS which works with the hardware they have, rather than sticking with
> OpenBSD.
Or choose to replace the hardware that isn't supportable by the
OS they want to run. Thank you LSI and Dell. LSI cards seem to work
fine.
-Bob
emphasis added by poster
Re:There's an old saying (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Why just documentation? (Score:3, Interesting)
I read Doug's response. What I SAW was Adaptec saying we'll be releasing everything together in 4 months. That is when the company is going to be ready to release an SDK, and documentation will be part of that release.
The OpenBSD guys response was "Can't you read! I want documentation NOW or I'm going to take my OS and go home."
So you have a company that is heading to the place the OpenBSD guys have asked for, but the OpenBSD guys are to impatient for the company's timeline. Oh - and the OpenBSD guys are being imature to boot.
Re:How many people... (Score:2, Interesting)
Binary drivers.
You can't review the source code to binary only drivers. Other open source OS projects don't pay the kind of attention to detail that OpenBSD does.I'm not accusing them of not caring at all, but they don't spend as much energy on it as the OpenBSD team.
Is that clearer?
LK
Re:Why just documentation? (Score:3, Interesting)
So it's not unreasonable for OpenBSD or any other OS to expect reasonable documentation on how to get it running within reasonable timeframe.
To give you an example, at our company we have been running FreeBSD for 5 years using the asr driver running Adaptec RAID 3210S (3200S before 3210S was out). As you may have noticed this card isn't even available anymore... WE have been TRYING to upgrade to the new 2200S cards running on aac driver for past year now. Our servers were unstable running 2200S cards. So we couldn't upgrade...
SO now we have a really hard time getting 3210S cards and the "new" (even though they are over a year old cards) don't work right. And I find the lack of providing proper documentation to people who want to write drivers for FREE in their SPARE time really appalling. Especially since these people are HELPING Adaptec.
Now I am at a position to either keep on using ancient (5 year old components) OR look for another vendor that can provide hardware that works correctly with FreeBSD. I will certainly not be switching to Windows JUST because the new Adaptec RAID cards don't work right in anything else but windows.
Of course I would rather if Adaptec just did the "right thing" and provided proper documentation to every OS project out there so proper drivers can be written for their hardware.
Re:Why just documentation? (Score:0, Interesting)
Well, throwing a fit is going to work, either. My boss reads Slashdot and various other boards/periodicals/etc in an effort to stay abreast of viable technologies, to include operating systems. I can assure you after seeing the immature fit being thrown by the OpenBSD folks there will be ZERO goddamn chance of me being able to persuade a Solaris to BSD migration this summer. Redhat AS 4 here I come!
Ask for the documents through multiple channels. If you don't get them, find a more "deserving" vendor who will give you what you need and support them to the hilt. Do NOT make an ass out of yourself and your OS group in public and then expect to be regarded as a professional.
In addition to politics I'm beginning to see why Darpa pulled the plug on these people.
Re:Why just OpenBSD? (Score:2, Interesting)
Asking nVidia to open source their 3d drivers is similar to asking adobe to open source photoshop, not asking Adaptec to document their raid API.
Also, there's competition with a relatively low barrier to entry in this case (extremely low for existing RAID controller manufacturers). There is a market for fully documented, open source friendly RAID controllers. It'll be interesting to see who grabs it.
Adaptec Losing It. (Score:3, Interesting)
Well, I have a number of Adaptec's ATA Raid Cards (ATA RAID 2400A), for the longest time they only supported RedHat 7.0. Now that Fedora is somewhat the premiere platform for me (three releases later), they are finally supporting Redhat 9.0.
With the the latest Fedora, there is no way to see if the raid array has a failed drive. So I instead use the card as a quad ATA controller, using software RAID. Guess if I'd buy another Adaptec piece of hardware???
Nobody mailbombed anyone at Adaptec. (Score:1, Interesting)
It's simply a BS excuse from Adaptec for taking down Richardson's known point-of-contact.
It also had the added benefite of portraying OpenBSD and Theo supporters as The Bad Guys(tm).
As always the suckers bought it, as suckers always will.
Re:Just a few thoughts (Score:3, Interesting)
I think if you go back and check the archives you'll find that the great majority of the four-letter words are not coming from the OpenBSD group. Ref: that "post on OSNews [osnews.com]".
And how many other kernel projects have rolled over for companies passing off binary-only drivers and management utilities? Seems the kids can't live without their hardware accelerated 3D shootem'-up games, eh?
Re:Why just documentation? (Score:1, Interesting)
And less than 5M of that was from RAID controllers.
Re:Why just documentation? (Score:5, Interesting)
- "write drivers for the niche 5% MacOS X or 5% other *nix market?
What you fail to take into account is that Adaptec RAID 5 controllers are a niche market meant for either hardcore users who need a RAID 5 array for storage, or for servers. To take an entire segment out of that niche and say "We don't want this business" is ludicrous.Last time I checked, OpenBSD is a decent sized segment of the server "niche market." Yes, it is a niche within a niche, but the PR implications of NOT providing documentation is huge, thanks to Slashdot.
This is what the topic is about -- the documentation requested is required to hotswap a failed drive, then rebuilt the array without needing to go into the BIOS and reboot. From what I read, other operating systems (ie: Windows) drivers have the ability to rebuilt the array without a reboot -- this is a huge feature required for many corporate and enterprise class servers.
I choose to vote for Open Source friendly companies with my dollars, and the influence I have on the dollars that my company will spend.
As I'm sure other people have rebutted, all they want is documentation -- Adaptec has a choice, they can choose either paying some $50 shipping and printing out a box of papers, or potentially a huge PR smear that would convince more than a few people to not buy their products.
End rant.
So what about the NDA? (Score:1, Interesting)
So come on nVidia, whose NDA is holding things up so we can ask them to relax enough for an OSS driver.