On 10/11/06, Dale Ghent <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
On Oct 11, 2006, at 7:36 PM, David Dyer-Bennet wrote:
> I've been running Linux since kernel 0.99pl13, I think it was, and
> have had amazingly little trouble. Whereas I'm now sitting on $2k of
> hardware that won't do what I wanted it to do under Solaris, so it's a
> bit of a hot-button issue for me right now.
Yes, but remember back in the days of Linux 0.99, the amount of PC
hardware was nowhere near as varied as it is today. Integrated
chipsets? A pipe dream! Aside from video card chips and proprietary
pre-ATAPI CDROM interfaces, you didn't have to reach far to find a
driver which covered a given piece of hardware because when you got
down to it, most hardware was the same. NE2000, anyone?
Yep, I had NE2000 cards; still have some I think, but not in use anymore.
Don't forget SCSI controllers! Of course I was running SCSI disks in
the Linux boxes back then (and the windows boxes).
And multi-serial cards, and multi-modem cards. I had a 16-port fast
serial card for the BBS (overkill, but 4 was nowhere near enough).
Today, in 2006 - much different story. I even had Linux AND Solaris
problems with my machine's MCP51 chipset when it first came out. Both
forcedeth and nge croaked on it. Welcome to the bleeding edge. You're
unfortunately on the bleeding edge of hardware AND software.
Yeah, and that's probably a mistake. But I already own the hardware.
What I'm pissed about, though, is that I tried fairly hard to
determine not just what hardware probably worked, but *how paranoid I
had to be* about hardware choice. I didn't, I feel, get the necessary
warning aobut the level of paranoia needed. That might have lead me
to different hardware, or it might have lead me to giving up on
Solaris, but it probably would have kept me away from the current
unfortunate position.
So one thing I'm trying to do to be helpful is to give people some
idea of how paranoid they have to be. I now have stories of people
who couldn't run cards that worked for others because of wrong chipset
versions, and my own system whose SATA subsystem doesn't support
hotswap is shown as fully supported in 32 and 64 bit mode by the
install test tool.
When in that situation, one can be patient, be helpful, or go back to
where one came from.
And in fact it seems fairly likely that Linux will have ZFS before
Solaris has SATA drivers for me. And I now have so many 400GB drives
that I no longer care about pool expandability for the next 2-3 years.
"Helpful" would be nice of course; though I haven't worked in device
drivers for Unix seriously since the early 90s, and don't know the
current Solaris module and driver environment at all. And it would
take many months to get anywhere, which doesn't really fit the plan
with that much money tied up in the hardware.
--
David Dyer-Bennet, <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, <http://www.dd-b.net/dd-b/>
RKBA: <http://www.dd-b.net/carry/>
Pics: <http://www.dd-b.net/dd-b/SnapshotAlbum/>
Dragaera/Steven Brust: <http://dragaera.info/>
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