[osol-mktg] RE: [osol-discuss] Solaris on Intel's Classmate PC?

[Stephen Lau]

On Sat, Mar 31, 2007 at 03:24:30PM +1200, Kaiwai Gardiner wrote:
>    Yes, I can understand the chicken and the egg scenario, however, one
>    has to look at this; I went down the road today, window shopping,
>    every laptop I had a look at down at the computer retailers had the
>    Intel 3945 A/B/G wireless chipset - it is the most popular chipset out
>    there, and normally coupled with the e1000g wired NIC - why,
>    considering how wide spread the device is, is it left completely
>    unsupported given that there is a *BSD licenced driver for it?

It's not been left unsupported.  
See CR 6381975; it's being worked on. 
Engineers are working on it now.

>    Sure, I can understand that Sun can't support *every* device that is
>    out there; that would be unreasonable, but given that there is
>    currently a working relationship between Sun and Intel, just as there
>    is a working relationship between AMD and Sun, there should be
>    absolutely *NO* reason for Solaris not supporting all the Intel
>    product line, just as there should be no excuse for Sun not to support
>    the full AMD/Ati product line.

Sure there is.  There are always budgetary, time, and other resource
constraints.  It's not always as simple as drawing lines between two
companies and saying we should now have a driver.

In any case, Intel 3945abg support is coming; but I'm sure it's not
trivial, so please be patient.

cheers,
steve

-- 
stephen lau // stevel at sun.com | 650.786.0845 | http://whacked.net
opensolaris // solaris kernel development