double-p
BOFH
Code:
From: Theo de Raadt <deraadt@cvs.openbsd.org>
...
I have been on holiday (obviously). I just wanted to ask that if
anyone ever sees someone complain about us not supporting a particular
raid controller, it would please me greatly if a bunch of readers
forwarded this specific message by dlg to such people, privately, of
course without cc'ing the list.
One day people must get this message through their heads. We stand
for way more than taking the easy and stupid way out when it comes
to supporting hardware, and this message is clear as to why.
> On 20/01/2006, at 11:18 AM, David Rhodus wrote:
> > Is there a reason one couldn't just port the driver from FreeBSD ?
>
> The freebsd driver has nothing in it to help us towards bioctl
> support for 3ware controllers.
>
> bio is all about having a single tool in userland to manage a diverse
> set of RAID controllers, with the smarts for dealing with the
> different controllers in the kernel driver. This can be compared to
> using ifconfig to manage and control the huge number of different
> network interfaces that are out there. ifconfig issues a generic
> request to the kernel and the driver deals with making it happen for
> that particular card.
>
> The freebsd idea of support for a raid controller is to open up a
> massive hole for a (vendor supplied and closed binary) userland tool
> to talk directly to the hardware with. The kernel is dumb and just
> passes messages around. To continue the comparison to ifconfig, if
> you took this approach to configuring your network card you would
> need to install a binary from the manufacturer of your network card
> and use that to change the ip address on your interface. For added
> fun the ifconfig tool from each vendor would work differently to each
> other and they would all have different terminology for the same things.
>
> bioctl is the ifconfig of raid controllers. The whole point of it is
> to provide an abstract interface on top of your hardware. This
> approach of abstracting things obviously works well for network cards
> and I see no reason for RAID to be any different. Can someone please
> explain to me what is so special about a RAID controller that
> prevents us from doing it? Why should we support these binary tools
> when they're the wrong way to do this?
>
> dlg