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

[Shawn Walker]

On 31/03/07, Kaiwai Gardiner <kaiwai.gardiner at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 31/03/07, Shawn Walker <binarycrusader at gmail.com> wrote:
> > 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.
>
>
> But given how easily that the OpenBSD drivers have been ported to NetBSD and
> FreeBSD, the 'documentation' red herring is an old wives tale.

That was between BSDs. Not to Linux, Solaris, etc. If you have any
experience porting drivers, you would know it isn't that easy.
Documentation isn't a red herring either. If the driver "peeks" and
"pokes" the hardware but doesn't tell you why, you're putting
yourselves and your customers at danger by trusting that it's doing
the right thing. You're also going to have a lot of egg on your face
when you can't explain why something doesn't work and you've committed
to support the device / driver.

-- 
"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/