Sitting on hands (no longer Re: FreeBSD vs Linux, Solaris, and NT)
"Michael C . Wu" wrote: On Tue, Dec 19, 2000 at 11:43:17AM -0500, Dennis scribbled: | | case and point: How many of us are sitting on our hands waiting for DG to | have time to fix the latest snafu in the if_fxp driver? You cant blame him | for having a job and earning a living, but the fact is that only he has | enough experience with the part to do the job. We all have source, but who | wants to spend a couple of weeks learning the intricacies of a very complex | part to fix what amounts to a very small bug? Many of us do. I, in fact, once did. It was a great learning opportunity for me and only a minor pain in the butt for DG. I collected data and learned where the driver hung, he realized almost immediately what was causing the problem and sent me a quick pointer to aonther driver that already had the same problem sovled, and it took me another few minutes to isolate the code, test, and provide a patch. It is a shame how many think they cannot be of help in a situation like this, when in reality they can be extremely helpful. One of the most important skills you can learn and polish as an open source contributor is to write good bug reports or descriptions. Instead of saying "your driver don't work with my xyz123 rev A-11 card", say "the card initialization enters the loop in xyz123.c at line 413 (rev 1.4.2.27) and never returns; if I change to the to exit after 1 million tries, the system boots but the the xyz123 device isn't in the dmesg." Then include the full dmesg and perhaps your kernel config if that might have something to do with it. You'd be astonished just how helpful you CAN be, simply by tracking down an appropriate routine, adding a few printfs, and isolating where the problem is occurring. -- "Where am I, and what am I doing in this handbasket?" Wes Peters Softweyr LLC [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://softweyr.com/ To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: newbus question
On Wed, Dec 20, 2000 at 09:52:55PM -0800, Mike Smith wrote: If the vga driver was newbusified, should I attach my graphic card specific driver to both the pci bus and the vga generic driver and let it be initialised twice with two initialisation functions and only one softc structure? No, I don't think so. If I understand what you're talking about, you want to add some extra initialisation for a specific but otherwise standard PCI VGA card, and you want to do this with a device driver which "owns" the card. Exactly. The best way I can think of doing this is as follows: - Your driver should determine whether the VGA adapter is the "primary" adapter. Working this out may be a little tricky. As a first cut, I would consider it as the only card. But yes, I should take this into account. - In your attach routine (not in the probe routine, since you may not actually win the probe bidding), add extra resources to the device_t which match the "legacy" VGA resources, so that you claim exclusive ownership of these resources. You can do this with bus_set_resource. Can I claim ISA resources while in a PCI probe? Resources are bus dependent like the bus_xxx_resource() functions. In fact, I want to add the linear buffer configuration trick for some S3 cards which have linear frame buffering support but *only* 1.2 VESA. It uses some extra ISA ports just after the standard VGA ones. For this, I was thinking of newbusifying vga / vesa and fb and attach my S3 trick to pci and vga. VGA would be a child of isa_vga, as currently, vesa a child of VGA and fb a child of VESA and VGA. Of course in a VESA+VGA configuration there would be two fb... one with vesa support, one without. But this would make the hypothesis that the PCI probe is made before the ISA. Which may not be the case (I don't know). As a matter of fact, the vga_S3 trick shall only be activated only if the PCI board is present. I'm a bit confused with the current architecture of the VGA/VESA/FB drivers. They call each other and not always in the same direction. Espacially the FB and VGA. Should we have the VGA driver as a backend of the FB one? Eventually with VESA between them. Tell me if I'm wrong. Nicholas -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] Alcôve - Open Source Software Engineer - http://www.alcove.fr To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: keeping lots of systems all the same...
Mike Nowlin wrote: I recently made the decision to upgrade all of our net-booted X terminals to full-blown workstations. (Basically, adding a hard drive and some memory.) Having 19 people running Netscape remotely on our Alpha is sucking up a gig of RAM and almost two gigs of swap, not to mention the "normal" things the Alpha has to do... After fighting off (quite violently, I might add) the top-level management who wanted to "just give everyone a Windows 98 machine - I never have any problems with mine at home...!", I came up with the following: -- Celeron 700-ish, 100Mb FXP, 20G, 64 or 128M, S3 or ATI Rage video -- NIS for uname/passwd auth - any user can use any machine -- /home mounted via NFS off a master file server for the users' files -- everything else (with whatever exceptions I find) on the local HD. -- (suggestions???) The users will basically need to be able to run X w/Gnome, StarOffice, Nutscrape, and (the huge, resource-hogging app) telnet. Figure 32MB RAM for FreeBSD X, 64MB for Netscape, and 64MB for StarOffice. If you want to run both Netscape and StarOffice at the same time, 128MB isn't enough. Sigh. If your users have a "usual" work position, you may way to place their home directory on that machine. Export all the home directories and mount them on the other machines using amd. This does make the amd configuration differ from machine to machine, however. WindowMaker feels much more snappy than Gnome on limited CPU resources. I'm not sure a 700 Mhz Celeron really qualifies, though. Durons are cheaper and faster than Celerons, though the motherboards may more than make up the difference in price. FreeBSD runs quite nicely on Duron and Athlon systems based on good motherboards. Good luck, and write an article about it when you're done. DaemonNews would be happy to publish it. ;^) -- "Where am I, and what am I doing in this handbasket?" Wes Peters Softweyr LLC [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://softweyr.com/ To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Question(About Fdisk Partition Editor)
Hello. I have trabbleed now,about Partion Editor when installing Free BSD ver.4.2 to my (office)PC. I would like to installing Free BSD my PC in office with remaining Windows 2000. When " Kernel Configulation Menu",I chose "Skip kernel configulation and continue with installation",and next I chose "Standard". When the window showed me like this, Disk name:ad0 Disk Geometry:1216 cyls /255 heads /63 sectors = 1953040 sectors(9538MB) OffsetSize(ST)End Name PType Desc Subtype Flags 0 63 62 -6 unused 0 631951891219518974 ad0s1 1 NTFS/HPFS/QNX 7 19518975 22113 19541087 -6unused 0 Then I chose "Quit",and in next window I chose "Standard". And, I reached the window "Free BSD Disklabel Editor", when I selected A... I had a message "You can only do this in a disk slice(at top of screen). Then I couldn't underatand what to do. And ,should I buy a boot selector?? -- Kieko [EMAIL PROTECTED] K.K. Tel:03-5349-3263 Fax:03-5349-7458 To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: keeping lots of systems all the same...
Figure 32MB RAM for FreeBSD X, 64MB for Netscape, and 64MB for StarOffice. If you want to run both Netscape and StarOffice at the same time, 128MB isn't enough. Sigh. Yup... I noticed that 64MB might be a little short when I set one of these up earlier today. :( I think I'll do 128 for now, since the price difference gets absorbed fairly easily into the total cost. Good luck, and write an article about it when you're done. DaemonNews would be happy to publish it. ;^) I may just do that. A real-world commercial FreeBSD success story could be good for PR. Although I have a soft spot in my heart for Linux, I prefer to use FBSD for "important" stuff, and it's about time that it gets some more good press... Due to the fact that this project is for a medical lab that's subject to the upcoming HIPAA regulations (check out www.hcfa.gov) and Medicare compliance policies, there's a lot to be said there about how FBSD handles the security aspects of this whole thing as compared to Redmond products... :) --mike To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: keeping lots of systems all the same...
Wes Peters [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: Mike Nowlin wrote: The users will basically need to be able to run X w/Gnome, StarOffice, Nutscrape, and (the huge, resource-hogging app) telnet. Figure 32MB RAM for FreeBSD X, 64MB for Netscape, and 64MB for StarOffice. If you want to run both Netscape and StarOffice at the same time, 128MB isn't enough. Sigh. Avoid StarOffice like the plague. It's neat, but it leaks like a sieve, and barely crawls along on my 450 MHz K6-2. DES -- Dag-Erling Smorgrav - [EMAIL PROTECTED] To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: FreeBSD vs Linux, Solaris, and NT
Dennis wrote: At 07:58 PM 12/19/2000, Julian Stacey [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Dennis wrote to Boris et all: Device Drivers -- I don´t like binary only device drivers. The code of an operating system is more complex than a driver. if a company does not want to publish the sourcecode, the should go away. You've lost all credibility here. Well supported device drivers should no t require source. I'd prefer a commercial (preferably the manufacters) support other than some guy in the ural mountains who fixes things IF he can get a card with a problem and IF he can duplicate the problem and IF hes a good enough coder to get it done. "hacker mentality" is not mainstream. 98% of people dont have a clue what `Mainstream' is a target some seek to avoid. Micro$oft exemplifies mainstream. Your "mentality" has caused you to alienate yourselves from the rest of the world, which serves your ego but not the FreeBSD community. Acts such as:: 1) refusing to fix the kernel Make to work properly with binary modules Dennis, Your headers are wrong, You wrote: To: "Julian Stacey [EMAIL PROTECTED]" [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: Boris [EMAIL PROTECTED], Murray Stokely [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED] Message-id: [EMAIL PROTECTED] I Julian, the addressee, Did Not refuse ... etc, or all the rest, So please fix your headers, or use "You `Persons name`". Re. a post of yours about a day before, to someone else, not me: When criticising a person's ideas or actions, adding personal perjoratives (IE calling names) can detract as well from critic, as from target. Julian - Julian Stacey Unix Consultant - Munich Germany http://bim.bsn.com/~jhs/ Considering Linux ? Try FreeBSD with its 4200 packages ! Ihr Rauchen = mein allergischer Kopfschmerz ! Kau/Schnupftabak probieren ! To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: Why not another style thread? (was Re: cvs commit: src/lib/libc/gen..
On Wed, 20 Dec 2000, Peter Seebach wrote:
In message [EMAIL PROTECTED], Aled Morris
writes:
Shouldn't you use "kill(0, SIGSEGV)" ?
Gratuitously verbose!
raise(SIGSEGV);
(To be fair, raise(SIGSEGV) is quite likely to just jump to the segfault
handler without actually setting any signal bits, but who can tell?[*])
From /usr/src/lib/libc/gen/raise.c:
int
raise(s)
int s;
{
return(kill(getpid(), s));
}
which raises an interesting difference between my "kill(0," and
the probably more rigourously correct "kill(getpid()," in the
context of trying to emulate the effect of "*(int *)0 = 1".
Aled
--
nic-hdl:AWM1-RIPE
To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: Supporting VirtualPC...
[EMAIL PROTECTED] (Peter Seebach) writes: I am wondering what would be considered a "good" way to encode the knowledge that machines with "ConnectixCPU" in the mode string need specific special treatment in two widely disparate places. Assuming the ident code correctly sets cpu_vendor to "ConnectixCPU" (rather than e.g. "GenuineIntel" or "AuthenticAMD") you can just check against that. It's declared in machine/md_var.h. DES -- Dag-Erling Smorgrav - [EMAIL PROTECTED] To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: FreeBSD vs Linux, Solaris, and NT
"babkin" == babkin [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: babkin Sorry for a stupid question but why would not they patent babkin this protocol then ? For example, PostScript is patented babkin by Adobe and the only reason everyone is able to use it is babkin that Adobe had explicitly granted this right to the babkin public. I don't think this is possible worldwide. In Europe, software patents do not exist and cannot be granted. There was an attempt to change this lately, but (luckily) it failed for the time being. The European Commision was convinced by open source advocates that software patents are bad. At least it made them think twice and postpone the process. The only thing you can protect is the implementation (the program, in this case to read/write the protocol) under copyright. Thus 'anyone' could learn the protocol from looking at the driver sourcecode and then implement a drop-in replacement for the card hardware. As others have said, given the rapid developments in the 3D graphics world, that hardly seems practible though. -- Peter Mutsaers | Dübendorf| UNIX - Live free or die [EMAIL PROTECTED] | Switzerland | Sent via FreeBSD 4.2-stable To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: Supporting VirtualPC...
In message [EMAIL PROTECTED], Dag-Erling Smorgrav writes: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Peter Seebach) writes: I am wondering what would be considered a "good" way to encode the knowledge that machines with "ConnectixCPU" in the mode string need specific special treatment in two widely disparate places. Assuming the ident code correctly sets cpu_vendor to "ConnectixCPU" (rather than e.g. "GenuineIntel" or "AuthenticAMD") you can just check against that. It's declared in machine/md_var.h. Yeah, but in an ideal world, I wouldn't be calling strcmp on the CPU type every time the ethernet card interrupts... Is there a good place to add a dummy variable that can be tested? Perhaps md_var.h could have #ifdef VPC_CPU int cpu_is_vpc; #endif and not break anyone's heart? I'm just trying to avoid stepping on namespace conventions. ;) -s To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: Supporting VirtualPC...
[EMAIL PROTECTED] (Peter Seebach) writes: Yeah, but in an ideal world, I wouldn't be calling strcmp on the CPU type every time the ethernet card interrupts... Is there a good place to add a dummy variable that can be tested? Perhaps md_var.h could have #ifdef VPC_CPU int cpu_is_vpc; #endif and not break anyone's heart? No. Check cpu_vendor at probe/attach time and set a flag in the interface's softc that indicates that it needs to be treated as a VPC emulated interface. DES -- Dag-Erling Smorgrav - [EMAIL PROTECTED] To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: GLide3 CVS - building patching
On Thu, Dec 14, 2000 at 04:09:30PM -0600, Stephen Hocking wrote: I've almost built the glide3 from sourceforge's CVS, and intend to make a port of it sometime (it's required for the latest DRI stuff) - has anyone else done this? This later version is also necessary for the voodoo 4 5, plus a few things in the headers have changed over time, which the DRI CVS tree seems to need. It would be great to have a port for this stuff. I've had a Voodoo 3 card for a while, but never managed to get all the pieces right so that OpenGL things would actually use it. -- Christopher Masto Senior Network Monkey NetMonger Communications [EMAIL PROTECTED][EMAIL PROTECTED]http://www.netmonger.net Free yourself, free your machine, free the daemon -- http://www.freebsd.org/ To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
RE: Sitting on hands (no longer Re: FreeBSD vs Linux, Solaris, and NT)
Here's the thing about open software that still concerns me. My background is with the major software development tools companies, so that is my point of reference. It is great that code is available and fixes are made and pushed out, but who is doing real testing of these fixes. Sure the obvious problem is fixed, but what other problems has it uncovered, what side effect has it created, and how about compatibility with other software or drivers in this case. With commercial software (well at least the places I worked) nothing could go out the door without a complete QA cycle performed on it. Even the smallest of bug fixes couldn't be released without a QA cycle. A full QA cycle was time consuming and expensive, so fixes sat until there was a stack of them to QA'd as a group or they had to wait until next upgrade. That way we knew state of the product. Yes, the state of the product would include known bugs. The key was a known bug and a known documented bug was as valuable as a fix. Sure a bug is bad, but if it is documented you don't waste trying to make something work that is known to be broke. So who is testing these fixes in open source world? Just seeing if the problem at hand is gone isn't real testing, even claiming thousands of people are now using it isn't enough. There can still be lurking potentially data destroying bugs lurking. In the open source world is there a official QA process or group. Is there a FreeBSD test suite that releases go through. QA is unglamorous work, but needs to be done. Steve B. -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On Behalf Of Wes Peters Sent: Thursday, December 21, 2000 12:28 AM To: Michael C . Wu Cc: Dennis; Boris; Murray Stokely; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Sitting on hands (no longer Re: FreeBSD vs Linux, Solaris, and NT) "Michael C . Wu" wrote: On Tue, Dec 19, 2000 at 11:43:17AM -0500, Dennis scribbled: | | case and point: How many of us are sitting on our hands waiting for DG to | have time to fix the latest snafu in the if_fxp driver? You cant blame him | for having a job and earning a living, but the fact is that only he has | enough experience with the part to do the job. We all have source, but who | wants to spend a couple of weeks learning the intricacies of a very complex | part to fix what amounts to a very small bug? Many of us do. I, in fact, once did. It was a great learning opportunity for me and only a minor pain in the butt for DG. I collected data and learned where the driver hung, he realized almost immediately what was causing the problem and sent me a quick pointer to aonther driver that already had the same problem sovled, and it took me another few minutes to isolate the code, test, and provide a patch. It is a shame how many think they cannot be of help in a situation like this, when in reality they can be extremely helpful. One of the most important skills you can learn and polish as an open source contributor is to write good bug reports or descriptions. Instead of saying "your driver don't work with my xyz123 rev A-11 card", say "the card initialization enters the loop in xyz123.c at line 413 (rev 1.4.2.27) and never returns; if I change to the to exit after 1 million tries, the system boots but the the xyz123 device isn't in the dmesg." Then include the full dmesg and perhaps your kernel config if that might have something to do with it. You'd be astonished just how helpful you CAN be, simply by tracking down an appropriate routine, adding a few printfs, and isolating where the problem is occurring. -- "Where am I, and what am I doing in this handbasket?" Wes Peters Softweyr LLC [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://softweyr.com/ To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: keeping lots of systems all the same...
On Thu, Dec 21, 2000 at 01:45:29AM -0700, Wes Peters wrote:
Figure 32MB RAM for FreeBSD X, 64MB for Netscape, and 64MB for StarOffice.
If you want to run both Netscape and StarOffice at the same time, 128MB
isn't enough. Sigh.
Definatly true. :-(
If your users have a "usual" work position, you may way to place their home
directory on that machine. Export all the home directories and mount them
on the other machines using amd. This does make the amd configuration differ
from machine to machine, however.
If you do it right the files will be the same on each machine. This
simple example shows how to keep a solaris box from loopback nfs
mounting its own file systems. A more complicated setup would do what
you describe with a single amd map (possiable shared via your favorite
directory service):
* -rfs:=/export/home/${key} \
host==draupnir;type:=lofs \
host!=draupnir;rhost:=draupnir
Good luck, and write an article about it when you're done. DaemonNews would
be happy to publish it. ;^)
That would be a really nice article.
-- Brooks
--
Any statement of the form "X is the one, true Y" is FALSE.
To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: kernel type
Andrew Reilly [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Yeah, but in what sense is that use of Mach a serious microkernel, if it's only got one server: BSD? IIRC the Mac parts of Mac OS X run as another server beside BSD on top of Mach. Tony. -- f.a.n.finch[EMAIL PROTECTED][EMAIL PROTECTED] "You realize there's a government directive stating that there is no such thing as a flying saucer?" To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: Sitting on hands (no longer Re: FreeBSD vs Linux, Solaris, and NT)
In message [EMAIL PROTECTED], "SteveB" wri tes: With commercial software (well at least the places I worked) nothing could go out the door without a complete QA cycle performed on it. Yes. This is why the open systems have "releases" every so often; a release has been run through something more like a QA cycle. The QA cycle is where the naive fools run "-current" believing it will have "new features". :) Even the smallest of bug fixes couldn't be released without a QA cycle. A full QA cycle was time consuming and expensive, so fixes sat until there was a stack of them to QA'd as a group or they had to wait until next upgrade. That way we knew state of the product. Yes, the state of the product would include known bugs. The key was a known bug and a known documented bug was as valuable as a fix. Sure a bug is bad, but if it is documented you don't waste trying to make something work that is known to be broke. But you can't *do* anything. Imagine a known bug "doesn't run on Pentium or later systems". That's pretty much totally crippling now. The important point is that you get the choice. You can run a stable release, with known bugs, or you can run slightly less tested code which fixes them. So who is testing these fixes in open source world? Just seeing if the problem at hand is gone isn't real testing, even claiming thousands of people are now using it isn't enough. There can still be lurking potentially data destroying bugs lurking. Yes. But that's just as true of a full QA cycle. Safety, in software, is an analogue signal, not a digital one. My experience (and I admit, I'm mostly from a NetBSD background) is that -current releases are dramatically more reliable, and less buggy, than commercial software. Testing, alone, does not catch bugs. *Analysis* does, and one of the things the open source community shines at is having a fix *analyzed* by a number of people. In the open source world is there a official QA process or group. Is there a FreeBSD test suite that releases go through. QA is unglamorous work, but needs to be done. I don't know about the "official" process, but I will tell you that I'd rather have my life depend on FreeBSD-current than on Windows NT, despite the "QA cycle". There are many ways to do effective QA. -s To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: FreeBSD vs Linux, Solaris, and NT
:If you want freebsd to remain a cult OS for hackers you are correct. : FreeBSD hasn't been a cult OS in a very long time, Dennis. You need to open your eyes a little more. The OSS world has changed in the last few years. :Reverse engineering is a myth. The result is so inferior to high-level :language source code as to not be a concern, plus its illegal so it cant be :marketed. Reverse engineering is very legal, and it is hardly a myth, nor is the result necessarily inferior. What is inferior are the thousands of commercial products that don't follow their own specs and the hundreds of chipsets that contain serious hardware bugs that the manufacturers don't bother to fix that we have to add hacks to support. What you are doing is using a few bad apples as an excuse to try to bulldoze the orchard. You shouldn't be surprised when people scoff at the attempt. Nobody is beholden to you... serious commercial enterprises which use FreeBSD also support its development and stay on top of the areas which they feel are important to them. Take Yahoo for example. If you are serious about FreeBSD and you want things handed to you on a platter, then the problem here is your own attitude. There is a cost to technology that goes far beyond the number of dollars you ring up on the register. -Matt To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: Sitting on hands (no longer Re: FreeBSD vs Linux, Solaris, and NT)
SteveB wrote: Here's the thing about open software that still concerns me. My background is with the major software development tools companies, so that is my point of reference. It is great that code is available and fixes are made and pushed out, but who is doing real testing of these fixes. Sure the obvious problem is fixed, but what other problems has it uncovered, what side effect has it created, and how about compatibility with other software or drivers in this case. With commercial software (well at least the places I worked) nothing could go out the door without a complete QA cycle performed on it. Even the smallest of bug fixes couldn't be released without a QA cycle. A full QA cycle was time consuming and expensive, so fixes sat until there was a stack of them to QA'd as a group or they had to wait until next upgrade. That way we knew state of the product. Yes, the state of the product would include known bugs. The key was a known bug and a known documented bug was as valuable as a fix. Sure a bug is bad, but if it is documented you don't waste trying to make something work that is known to be broke. So who is testing these fixes in open source world? Just seeing if the problem at hand is gone isn't real testing, even claiming thousands of people are now using it isn't enough. There can still be lurking potentially data destroying bugs lurking. In the open source world is there a official QA process or group. Is there a FreeBSD test suite that releases go through. QA is unglamorous work, but needs to be done. Steve B. -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On Behalf Of Wes Peters Sent: Thursday, December 21, 2000 12:28 AM To: Michael C . Wu Cc: Dennis; Boris; Murray Stokely; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Sitting on hands (no longer Re: FreeBSD vs Linux, Solaris, and NT) "Michael C . Wu" wrote: On Tue, Dec 19, 2000 at 11:43:17AM -0500, Dennis scribbled: | | case and point: How many of us are sitting on our hands waiting for DG to | have time to fix the latest snafu in the if_fxp driver? You cant blame him | for having a job and earning a living, but the fact is that only he has | enough experience with the part to do the job. We all have source, but who | wants to spend a couple of weeks learning the intricacies of a very complex | part to fix what amounts to a very small bug? Many of us do. I, in fact, once did. It was a great learning opportunity for me and only a minor pain in the butt for DG. I collected data and learned where the driver hung, he realized almost immediately what was causing the problem and sent me a quick pointer to aonther driver that already had the same problem sovled, and it took me another few minutes to isolate the code, test, and provide a patch. It is a shame how many think they cannot be of help in a situation like this, when in reality they can be extremely helpful. One of the most important skills you can learn and polish as an open source contributor is to write good bug reports or descriptions. Instead of saying "your driver don't work with my xyz123 rev A-11 card", say "the card initialization enters the loop in xyz123.c at line 413 (rev 1.4.2.27) and never returns; if I change to the to exit after 1 million tries, the system boots but the the xyz123 device isn't in the dmesg." Then include the full dmesg and perhaps your kernel config if that might have something to do with it. You'd be astonished just how helpful you CAN be, simply by tracking down an appropriate routine, adding a few printfs, and isolating where the problem is occurring. -- "Where am I, and what am I doing in this handbasket?" Wes Peters Softweyr LLC [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://softweyr.com/ To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message Please tell me this again. My experience lots of bugs go out the door. Finding them is not easy. Some had dangerous secuiry flaws missed until one playing around with logs a lot and tries all sort of strange things somethings one ins't supposed to. One had an FTP secuirty flaw allowing multiple retests of password. That and a good dirctionary attack and one could drive the proverbial mack truck through. The Machine I trested had a good easy to remember but mixed langauage pawword so multiple attacks via dictionary showed in the log as about 500 attempts at root login w/ eventual failure. If the password tried on a dummy account (say Jay Random) with the Japanese Password "Shashin" (meaning photograph showed up surprisingly after tests. Common Error such as girls or boys names were like 10 tries at most and many passed the
Pentium 4
Hi, Is there now support for the Pentium 4 in FreeBSD?? If so, is there an option such as CPUCLASS 786 in the Kernel?? -- Jamie Heckford Chief Network Engineer Psi-Domain - Innovative Linux Solutions. Ask Us How. = email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] web:http://www.psi-domain.co.uk/ tel:+44 (0)1737 789 246 fax:+44 (0)1737 789 245 mobile: +44 (0)7779 646 529 = To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
RE: Pentium 4
On 21-Dec-00 Jamie Heckford wrote:
Hi,
Is there now support for the Pentium 4 in FreeBSD??
Yes.
If so, is there an option such as CPUCLASS 786 in the Kernel??
No. The p5-4 is just a 686 AFAIK:
{ "Pentium 4", CPUCLASS_686 }, /* CPU_P4 */
--
John Baldwin [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- http://www.FreeBSD.org/~jhb/
PGP Key: http://www.baldwin.cx/~john/pgpkey.asc
"Power Users Use the Power to Serve!" - http://www.FreeBSD.org/
To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: Sitting on hands (no longer Re: FreeBSD vs Linux, Solaris, and NT)
In message [EMAIL PROTECTED], "SteveB" wri tes: It would just make pitching FreeBSD and other open OS's in the enterprise a lot easier if there was an QA process that official releases went through. There might be; I haven't looked. I am pretty happy with the results of whatever's being done now, so maybe the right thing to do is document it. ;) Also volunteering to QA would be a good training ground to gain familiarity with a OS and a chance to communicate with developers. True. One of the nice things about the BSD's is that, while anyone can develop code and contribute it, there's a certain amount of review it has to pass before it's actually *USED*. -s To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: Sitting on hands (no longer Re: FreeBSD vs Linux, Solaris, and NT)
In message [EMAIL PROTECTED], admin@bsdfan .cncdsl.com writes: Here's the thing about open software that still concerns me. My background is with the major software development tools companies, so that is my point of reference. It is great that code is available and fixes are made and pushed out, but who is doing real testing of these fixes. Sure the obvious problem is fixed, but what other problems has it uncovered, what side effect has it created, and how about compatibility with other software or drivers in this case. With commercial software (well at least the places I worked) nothing could go out the door without a complete QA cycle performed on it. In a past life, I did half the design and implementation of the software tracking calls and letting the billing software know about them on a CDMA cellular base station. For hardware, we used machines from the biggest workstation vendor with a three letter name, running the latest production release of their Unix. Before booting the putz from our team who'd crippled our software with threads and excised the damage he'd done, we regularly dumped the machines out to the ROM monitor. I know people who work in several operating systems groups at that company, know a bit about their quality control process, and know that it was insufficient. I've yet to encounter a bug of that severity in any released version of free software (about the worst which wasn't hardware related is the FreeBSD Tulip driver not working correctly in full-duplex 100baseT mode). So who is testing these fixes in open source world? Cygnus is/was doing automated regression testing on GCC. Just seeing if the problem at hand is gone isn't real testing, even claiming thousands of people are now using it isn't enough. In theory, a standard suite of white and black box tests should be superior. Given inumerable bad experiences with Adobe, IBM, HP, Microsoft, Sun and other smaller companies, in practice it doesn't seem to work any better than the million-monkeys approach. QA is unglamorous work, but needs to be done. Does this mean you're volunteering? To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
RE: Sitting on hands (no longer Re: FreeBSD vs Linux, Solaris, and NT)
-Original Message- From: Drew Eckhardt [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Thursday, December 21, 2000 12:15 PM To: SteveB Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: Sitting on hands (no longer Re: FreeBSD vs Linux, Solaris, and NT) In message [EMAIL PROTECTED], admin@bsdfan .cncdsl.com writes: QA is unglamorous work, but needs to be done. Does this mean you're volunteering? I don't have a lot of time, but I would volunteer if there was a QA project. I think it would be a good learning experience. Steve B. To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
problems in pcm driver
Hackers, I am trying to sort out some issues with the newpcm driver, and before I go traipsing around the source base I thought I should ask whether anyone has had any luck resolving this (no sense reinventing the wheel). I have a CS461x (which apparently is a 4614, 4622, or 4624) sound chip. In the kernel config, I specify 'device pcm' and 'device csa': I have tried many permutations configurationwise, probably too many to list. Playing an MP3 file pauses for a few moments, throws three "pcm0: play interrupt timeout, channel dead" errors, and on subsequent attempts, /dev/dsp is locked. My development platform is a ThinkPad 570E. I have built 4.2-RELEASE, 4.2-STABLE, and 5.0-CURRENT (as of last night), and the problem exists on all platforms. Just wanted to see whether anyone else was working on this problem, or had a solution to it, before I started to seriously take a look at it. Cheers, /gdm To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: Pentium 4
Is there now support for the Pentium 4 in FreeBSD?? We've always run on the P4. If so, is there an option such as CPUCLASS 786 in the Kernel?? No, it's still a 686. -- ... every activity meets with opposition, everyone who acts has his rivals and unfortunately opponents also. But not because people want to be opponents, rather because the tasks and relationships force people to take different points of view. [Dr. Fritz Todt] V I C T O R Y N O T V E N G E A N C E To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: Sitting on hands (no longer Re: FreeBSD vs Linux, Solaris, and NT)
SteveB wrote: -Original Message- From: Drew Eckhardt [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Thursday, December 21, 2000 12:15 PM To: SteveB Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: Sitting on hands (no longer Re: FreeBSD vs Linux, Solaris, and NT) In message [EMAIL PROTECTED], admin@bsdfan .cncdsl.com writes: QA is unglamorous work, but needs to be done. Does this mean you're volunteering? I don't have a lot of time, but I would volunteer if there was a QA project. I think it would be a good learning experience. One of the things I have been doing it cycling through 4 systems upgrading the userland and kernel. I have a script setup such that I capture everything from the cvsup log to build and installs. During the transition between 4.1.1-stable and 4.2-stable, one of this systems was updated everyday. It isn't a QA cycle that I experienced in the commercial world associated with the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission but it did insure that my setups work. If someone popps up on -stable and says that the "Buildworld is failing" for 4-stable, it is really easy to fire off that script and find out if it is. I have one running at this time. Kent Steve B. To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message -- Kent Stewart Richland, WA mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://kstewart.urx.com/kstewart/index.html FreeBSD News http://daily.daemonnews.org/ To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
RE: Sitting on hands (no longer Re: FreeBSD vs Linux, Solaris, a
On 21-Dec-00 SteveB wrote: -Original Message- From: Drew Eckhardt [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Thursday, December 21, 2000 12:15 PM To: SteveB Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: Sitting on hands (no longer Re: FreeBSD vs Linux, Solaris, and NT) In message [EMAIL PROTECTED], admin@bsdfan .cncdsl.com writes: QA is unglamorous work, but needs to be done. Does this mean you're volunteering? I don't have a lot of time, but I would volunteer if there was a QA project. I think it would be a good learning experience. Subscribe to the [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list and make some noise. :) Steve B. -- John Baldwin [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- http://www.FreeBSD.org/~jhb/ PGP Key: http://www.baldwin.cx/~john/pgpkey.asc "Power Users Use the Power to Serve!" - http://www.FreeBSD.org/ To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: New netgraph features?
John Smith writes: Well, may be I didn't said exactly what I wanted to. If we use say, ksocket nodes as a tunnel, we will transfer the data - ok, but what about metadata? May be I should say 'to connect two netgraphs'? May be this is a lost cause, but that's why I'm asking. Yes, there would need to be some extra stuff. Here are some quick possibilities.. - We'd need to enhace the definition of a netgraph address to include, say, an IP address, eg.: $ ngctl msg 192.168.1.12:foo: blah blah - Encode control messsages in their ASCII forms for transit across the network - Pick a well known UDP port to be used for netgraph messages and data packets - Create a node type that could listen on this port (using ng_ksocket) and do the required encoding/decoding. -Archie __ Archie Cobbs * Packet Design * http://www.packetdesign.com To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: Sitting on hands (no longer Re: FreeBSD vs Linux, Solaris, and NT)
On Thu, Dec 21, 2000 at 12:40:22PM -0800, SteveB wrote: I don't have a lot of time, but I would volunteer if there was a QA project. Good QA takes time. -- -- David ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) GNU is Not Unix / Linux Is Not UniX To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: Sitting on hands (no longer Re: FreeBSD vs Linux, Solaris, and NT)
On Thu, Dec 21, 2000 at 11:53:50AM -0600, Peter Seebach wrote: In message [EMAIL PROTECTED], "SteveB" writes: In the open source world is there a official QA process or group. Is there a FreeBSD test suite that releases go through. QA is unglamorous work, but needs to be done. I don't know about the "official" process, but I will tell you that I'd rather have my life depend on FreeBSD-current than on Windows NT, despite the "QA cycle". There are many ways to do effective QA. Yup. I think the important point here is that the formal QA cycle is a means to an end, but it's not the only way to achieve that end. I get concerned that those who point to a lack of a QA cycle in open source software are missing the point entirely: They're focussing on the 'process' they're familiar with so much that they don't seem to acknowledge that alternative approaches can demonstrate similar results. At the end of the day, the track record of major open-source projects speaks for itself: Yes, there are bugs, but there are bugs in commercial software which is shaped and bounded by QA procedures as well. Overall, though, I'd hazard a guess that open-source software is generally more reliable (it is in my experience, anyway). - mark -- Mark Newton Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (W) Network Engineer Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (H) Internode Systems Pty Ltd Desk: +61-8-82232999 "Network Man" - Anagram of "Mark Newton" Mobile: +61-416-202-223 To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: FreeBSD vs Linux, Solaris, and NT
At 01:22 PM 12/21/2000, Matt Dillon wrote: :If you want freebsd to remain a cult OS for hackers you are correct. : FreeBSD hasn't been a cult OS in a very long time, Dennis. You need to open your eyes a little more. The OSS world has changed in the last few years. Yes but most commercial uses take advantage of the binary distribution capability of the BSD license AFTER they've poured their corporate dollars into enhancements. With linux you have to give your work away, making it much less useful. :Reverse engineering is a myth. The result is so inferior to high-level :language source code as to not be a concern, plus its illegal so it cant be :marketed. Reverse engineering is very legal, and it is hardly a myth, nor is the result necessarily inferior. What is inferior are the thousands of commercial products that don't follow their own specs and the hundreds of chipsets that contain serious hardware bugs that the manufacturers don't bother to fix that we have to add hacks to support. What you are doing is using a few bad apples as an excuse to try to bulldoze the orchard. No, the original writer was trying to use a very general argument about the absolute uselessness of binary code, which is disgustingly wrong. Im sure you dont disagree. Your argument is sound only if the manufacturer doesnt implement those "fixes" in their binary drivers, which they usually do. Its also more likely that they will use the correct workarounds and will know about them before they bite end users in the arse, which is usually not the case with "free" drivers typically found in free OSs. the previous writer used "objdump" as an example of reverse engineering software, the marketing of which would be illegal. Certainly you can figure out how something works and write an original driver for it, but thats not really reverse engineering to me. its still original code. Dennis To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: Sitting on hands (no longer Re: FreeBSD vs Linux, Solaris, and NT)
Mark Newton wrote: I get concerned that those who point to a lack of a QA cycle in open source software are missing the point entirely: They're focussing on the 'process' they're familiar with so much that they don't seem to acknowledge that alternative approaches can demonstrate similar results. We open source zealots "know" this, but still it would nice to be able to point to some empirical data -- has anybody done a PhD thesis on it? If not, what are all the students waiting for? At the end of the day, the track record of major open-source projects speaks for itself: Yes, there are bugs, but there are bugs in commercial software which is shaped and bounded by QA procedures as well. Overall, though, I'd hazard a guess that open-source software is generally more reliable (it is in my experience, anyway). Again, that's the common experience, but it's easier to have the experience you expect when you're not constrained by facts. I'd love to see some good statistics. After all, open source people didn't get the chance to have the Ariane-5 disaster, so our ability to point to an empty set of such examples doesn't really prove anything. I'm a True Believer in the open source / free software gospel, but it would be easier to win these arguments if only we had the data. -- Greg Black ech`echo xiun | tr nu oc | sed 'sx\([sx]\)\([xoi]\)xo un\2\1 is xg'`ol To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: FreeBSD vs Linux, Solaris, and NT
In message [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED] m writes: Yes but most commercial uses take advantage of the binary distribution capability of the BSD license AFTER they've poured their corporate dollars into enhancements. With linux you have to give your work away, making it much less useful. To be pedantic, you only need to provide source for works derived from GPL'd software which in this case means the kernel propper. User land applications and device drivers may be shipped in binary-only form because they are separate works, even when distributed in aggregation with GPL'd software. To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: FreeBSD vs Linux, Solaris, and NT
:No, the original writer was trying to use a very general argument about the :absolute uselessness of binary code, which is disgustingly wrong. Im sure :you dont disagree. Your argument is sound only if the manufacturer doesnt :implement those "fixes" in their binary drivers, which they usually do. Its :also more likely that they will use the correct workarounds and will know :about them before they bite end users in the arse, which is usually not the :case with "free" drivers typically found in free OSs. : :the previous writer used "objdump" as an example of reverse engineering :software, the marketing of which would be illegal. Certainly you can figure :out how something works and write an original driver for it, but thats not :really reverse engineering to me. its still original code. : :Dennis You are correct about objdump ... that isn't reverse engineering. But while I generally agree that there is nothing wrong with binaries, I make a big distinction between user-level binaries and kernel-level modules. I think user-level binaries are perfectly acceptable, but I have strong reservations in regards to kernel-level binaries. Kernels change all the time... there is no 'API' per-say... at least nothing like the relatively stable syscall interface user-level binaries enjoy. And as has been pointed out time and time again, the vast majority of commercial device driver writers don't know jack about the OS they are writing for and proceed to do all sorts of illegal things in the driver code. In that respect, I personally will not run anything inside my kernel that I don't have source for. Now, I don't run frame-relay or T1's into FreeBSD boxes, so I'm not commenting on your software specifically. I'm commenting in general. The problem is not only support, but also protection against obsolescence. Companies upgrade their products, companies go out of business, companies stop supporting products. Without source you can wind up S.O.L. with a binary-only device driver. It's just too risky for me. Just look at all the poor windows bozos who are forced to throw away half their software every time they upgrade to a new version of Windows when Microsoft stops supporting the older releases. That is not a cycle I will ever willingly get into. -Matt To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: Sitting on hands (no longer Re: FreeBSD vs Linux, Solaris, and NT)
Greg Black wrote: Mark Newton wrote: I get concerned that those who point to a lack of a QA cycle in open source software are missing the point entirely: They're focussing on the 'process' they're familiar with so much that they don't seem to acknowledge that alternative approaches can demonstrate similar results. We open source zealots "know" this, but still it would nice to be able to point to some empirical data -- has anybody done a PhD thesis on it? If not, what are all the students waiting for? opensource quality depends on 2 things: 1/ the quality of teh original instigators. A bad design takes a lot to fix: 2/ the popularity of the project.. (to some extent) (and with who). The number of talented people with high enough interest needs to be greater than 1 and there are limits to how many such people there are.. (2 talented people with not a lot of time is probably less than 1 talented person with time) -- __--_|\ Julian Elischer / \ [EMAIL PROTECTED] ( OZ) World tour 2000 --- X_.---._/ presently in: Budapest v To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Trouble with lseek
I am trying to determine the size of a file passed as a command line argument. I am using SYS_lseek. Here is the code up to that point: _start: pop eax ; argc pop eax ; program name pop ecx ; file to convert jecxz usage pop eax or eax, eax; Too many arguments? jne usage ; Open the file pushdword O_RDWR pushecx sys.open jc cantopen mov ebp, eax; Save fd ; Find file size sub eax, eax pushdword SEEK_END pusheax pusheax ; 0 bytes from eof pushebp ; fd sys.lseek jc facerr Unfortunately, the SYS_lseek returns an error (carry is set, EAX=0x16=ESPIPE). Why? I am not creating any pipes there. The fd returned by the SYS_open is 3, as expected, so why does SYS_lseek fail? The sys.lseek macro does a mov eax, 199 / call kernel.function, where kernel.function is int 80h / ret. Adam -- Can you imagine the silence if everyone said only what he knows! -- Karel apek To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: keeping lots of systems all the same...
No one I noticed yet mentioned ports/net/rsync as an alternative to src/usr.bin/rdist ports/net/rdist6 for "keeping lots of systems all the same" but as I too use rdist I can't tell more on rsync. BTW I use rdist for maintaing - site wide common trees in a /site/ tree of etc usr overlay stuff reached from real /etc /usr trees via relative (no rooted) sym links - my off site web directories - my laptop PS make damn sure you always back up the right way, easily said, but easy to get wrong, especially with a cron driven rdist, that can zap your laptop or tower in the wrong direction. EG on return from a business trip a cron driven backup of tower to laptop is a disaster ;-) Julian - Julian Stacey Unix Consultant - Munich Germany http://bim.bsn.com/~jhs/ Considering Linux ? Try FreeBSD with its 4200 packages ! Ihr Rauchen = mein allergischer Kopfschmerz ! Kau/Schnupftabak probieren ! To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: FreeBSD vs Linux, Solaris, and NT
Matt Dillon wrote: :If you want freebsd to remain a cult OS for hackers you are correct. FreeBSD hasn't been a cult OS in a very long time, Dennis. You need to open your eyes a little more. The OSS world has changed in the last few years. :Reverse engineering is a myth. The result is so inferior to high-level :language source code as to not be a concern, plus its illegal so it cant be :marketed. Reverse engineering is very legal, and it is hardly a myth, nor .. -Matt Examiners at the European Patent Office http://www.epo.org tell me: Reverse engineering is legal in Europe, Illegal in USA. I never asked about Canada, Japan, Oz, Russia etc :-) ie laws vary, you may actually both be right, it's legal illegal, depending where. Julian - Julian Stacey Unix Consultant - Munich Germany http://bim.bsn.com/~jhs/ Considering Linux ? Try FreeBSD with its 4200 packages ! Ihr Rauchen = mein allergischer Kopfschmerz ! Kau/Schnupftabak probieren ! To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: Sitting on hands (no longer Re: FreeBSD vs Linux, Solaris, and NT)
It would just make pitching FreeBSD and other open OS's in the enterprise a lot easier if there was an QA process that official releases went through. Also volunteering to QA would be a good training ground to gain familiarity with a OS and a chance to communicate with developers. Steve B. This is a good idea. I wouldn't mind being involved in a program like this (volunteering for QA) if something can be organized.. Gilbert To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: Sitting on hands (no longer Re: FreeBSD vs Linux, Solaris, and NT)
* Gilbert Gong [EMAIL PROTECTED] [001221 18:45] wrote: It would just make pitching FreeBSD and other open OS's in the enterprise a lot easier if there was an QA process that official releases went through. Also volunteering to QA would be a good training ground to gain familiarity with a OS and a chance to communicate with developers. Steve B. This is a good idea. I wouldn't mind being involved in a program like this (volunteering for QA) if something can be organized.. What would extremely helpful would be a port that basically installed a bunch of utilities to stress the system into a chroot enviorment and ran a regression suite doing things like faking a large news server, serving a lot of http content etc. It would be helpful if the port was two parts, one for the test box and one as a client for the test box. Just some ideas for direction if you guys want to pick up the ball here. -- -Alfred Perlstein - [[EMAIL PROTECTED]|[EMAIL PROTECTED]] "I have the heart of a child; I keep it in a jar on my desk." To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: Software Patents. Was Re: FreeBSD vs Linux, Solaris, and NT
Hello Julian, Thursday, December 21, 2000, 5:20:31 PM, you wrote: I really hope that software patent´s wont be possible in Europe. This would be a real problem for some of us who are not only consulting but developing, too. I remember that a lot of people try to get a patent on the lamest routines and if someadays these patents are legal, they will make money. There are a lot of people out in the world who have very good ideas for good products and they want to develop them to make money (as me, it´s my job - consulting and developing) - but without software patents. I think software patents in Europe would be very dangerous and a lot of people will get a lot of problems. We should not destroy the computer world as the same world, named reality. In "our" world, the computer-specialists are the formers and directors what will be in the feature. The most of us have the ideals to make a "better world" in digital form. A lot of people with a lot of good ideas. On the other side, there are a lot of people wo can´t be rich enough. They try to destroy everything we build over the years. The do not understand what we want to do and where we want to go. We all want to be together, a mega-big community over the world. We want to realise projects in peace and together to build the "most perfect code". We have a lot of fun with doing this. We want to learn and we want to make things better, for fun and to earn some money, too. In the last month I had a very bad dream. Someone said "Now, it is possible to have software patents about everything in the word". And a group of people went to the "digital underground". They are developing and redistributing their operating system still for free, but no one knows who is developing on it. Some of them get caught and they are arrested, because they would develop and distribute software with patented algorithms and so on and this won´t be allowed. A VERY BAD DREAM. And I know if there would really be software patents in europe, a lot of people would build a digital underground, where ideas are ideas, and where we have no restrictions. A lot of us are dreamers with a lot of visions. I really hope that this will not be destroyed by people who can´t be rich enought! I am developing since I am 12 years old. Now I am 25 and I am still developing. I won´t stop it, I love it. If routines i am using are restricted or patented, I really would ask myself for what person I am working. For me, or for someone who was a silly one and patented every silly routine. If this happens, that nearly every routine can be patented, then I really don´t know what to do. I don´t want to think that I have spent the years with learning and developing and now I would have to pay license fees for someone who was rich enough to patent some houndrets of (mostly silly) routines. Some people can´t be rich enough. They destroy everything. We developers should do everything that this won´t happen in Europe or other nations. We computer-freaks want a mega great community. Freedom. Knowledge and peace. This is the way we go. Fight against patents! -- Best regards, Borismailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: Trouble with lseek
Earlier I posted some asm code that was causing me trouble with lseek. I have since figured it out, and should be posting the information on my asm tutorial within a day or two. Cheers, Adam -- This signature intentionally left blank To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
RE: FreeBSD vs Linux, Solaris, and NT
Trouble is there is no consistency in the rulings. Hardware decisions in general are mirrors of software cases. Hardware reverse engineering tends to be legal. But with software they use Clean programmer, Dirty programmer. In other words you can write a program exactly like another, if you can prove you never saw the other program. If you saw the similar program you are dirty. The weird thing is your Marketing people can see the other program and tell you what to do. That's legal. Steve B. -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On Behalf Of Drew Eckhardt Sent: Thursday, December 21, 2000 10:17 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: FreeBSD vs Linux, Solaris, and NT In message [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: Examiners at the European Patent Office http://www.epo.org tell me: Reverse engineering is legal in Europe, Illegal in USA. Back in the early nineties, Nintendo sued some one in America for reverse engineering the circuit included in every cartridge and using what they learned to sell cartridges without buying the protection chip from them. Nintendo lost. If you dig deeper, I believe you'll find cases from the mainframe era with similar rulings. To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: Sitting on hands (no longer Re: FreeBSD vs Linux, Solaris, and NT)
On Thu, Dec 21, 2000 at 12:03:23PM -0800, Gilbert Gong wrote: It would just make pitching FreeBSD and other open OS's in the enterprise a lot easier if there was an QA process that official releases went through. Also volunteering to QA would be a good training ground to gain familiarity with a OS and a chance to communicate with developers. Steve B. This is a good idea. I wouldn't mind being involved in a program like this (volunteering for QA) if something can be organized.. Join the freebsd-qa mailing list, and contribute some effort towards stress-testing parts of the system, developing regression suites, etc. A better FreeBSD release is up to you! :-) Kris PGP signature
