On 6/12/06, Jirtme Loyet <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Scott Plumlee wrote:
> Anyone who hasn't seen a broken piece of HW that works fine
> with X but not Y is new to the game. Anyone who trusts a HW
> diagnostic to "give"
> them the answer is really, really new to the game.
>
> By themselves, diagnostics are like a screwdriver: in the
> hands of a knowledgeable person, very useful. In the hands
> of an idiot, dangerous.
> Without a brain engaged in their use and analysis of the
> results, they are just an inert object.
>
>
> The OP already answered his own question (and been told this
> by others).
> The machine has a buggy BIOS.
> One version works, another doesn't.
>
> Why do you think there is more than one revision? Because
> bugs were found. Odds are, those bugs were NOT found on
> OpenBSD, they were probably found running Windows, maybe
> Linux. OpenBSD *may* expose those bugs more clearly...but
> odds are, if you use that same buggy BIOS with another OS,
> you may learn to regret it.
>
> Would it be possible to "fix" OpenBSD to work around this
> bug? Maybe.
> Completely pointless and self-defeating, however. Fix it for
> the buggy BIOS, you probably broke it for the "correct"
> BIOS....and now you have a chunk of code usable on precisely
> one variant of one bad computer. The code will not be
> properly maintained, and will probably do more bad than good
> some day in the future, if not immediately. Sometimes buggy
> hardware has to be worked around, because no fix is available
> or possible from the manufacturer and there is a clear
> benefit to adding "special case" code. When a proper fix IS
> available from the vendor, it is usually preferable to use it
> than to work around it.
>
> Hey, if this problem turns out to expose a true logic bug in
> OpenBSD, go ahead, find it, show us, and get credit for the
> fix. But if "everytime the panic is different", it sounds
> like things are Just Plain Broke on the system, if a BIOS
> upgrade fixes it, sounds like the hardware wasn't set up
> properly, and the manufacturer figured that out, and FIXED
> THE PROBLEM.
But how to explain that ONLY OpenBSD and NetBSD are buggy. Thousand of
machines are working fine with FreeBSD, many linux and even windows. Every
machine is used in a different manner (streaming server, web server, mail
server, cluster, and so on ...) which make me thought that's it's a net/open
BSD problem. I'm maybe wrong ... But I don't understand why now ;)
Because something [Open|Net]BSD does is triggering the bug, whereas it
is either worked-around already on the other OSes you mentioned (fully
possible, given their design philosophies), or they just don't happen
to do whatever causes the problem.
I think it would be enlightening to find out precisely what the
problem is, but there are other enlightening problems that don't have
such trivial(?) solutions available.
Get the Bios upgraded (iirc, your hoster is being a jerk and refusing
to do that, right? so be a squeeky wheel...)
-Nick2
