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

[Shawn Walker]

On 30/03/07, Kaiwai Gardiner <kaiwai.gardiner at gmail.com> 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?

As mentioned before, just because some random piece of code is
available for a device doesn't mean that there is not a good reason
for a driver to be available. Just as OpenBSD supports many wireless
devices that Linux does not yet support, Solaris does not yet support
many devices as well -- even the "common" ones.

Just as others have talked about during the "GPL driver debate", if
Solaris were suddenly under the GPLv2, it wouldn't magically make
thousands of drivers available for instant use. Porting drivers is
hard work, and many times its easier to write a new one with well
documented specs than to try to port one that is poorly documented,
friendly license or not.

> 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.

Given that the ATi division is still incredibly secretive about the
hardware specs, even with business that have a relationship with them,
there are reasons for not having full support. One of those reasons is
ATi. As I've mentioned to others before, I know of one company in
particular that even offered money to ATi to write a closed source
driver under nda driver and they refused to offer the necessary
specifications. I can only hope AMD will slowly change that behaviour,
but until it does, there are reasons.

The wheels of the corporate world move *very* slowly, especially when
exchanging what each company perceives as "trade secrets"
(legitimately or not).

-- 
"Less is only more where more is no good." --Frank Lloyd Wright

Shawn Walker, Software and Systems Analyst
binarycrusader at gmail.com - http://binarycrusader.blogspot.com/