[lugm.org] the importance of hardware documentation

[Loganaden Velvindron]

Hello,

Happy new year.

I got an Asus P5SD2-VM as a gift. Eager as I was, I ran openbsd-current
on it.

The install failed, and I had to do a PXE boot install.

After the installation, I tried to insert a CDROM and boom ! Complete freeze.

The freeze turned out to be a bug in the DMA of the onboard IDE controller.

None of this is documented on the SiS website ! SiS doesn't think it shouldn't

inform its customers about those defects. The large open source vendors (Linux,
OpenSolaris ?, and freebsd) do not push for hardware documentation to be available.

This is a problem which has been plaguing open source for years. If SiS had an office
in mauritius, I would have staged a sit-in protest. 


I'm sick of wading through linux source code to get clues about how some crappy piece
of IDE controller is supposed to work. IDE is OLD technology, what's the use of locking
documentation ? SiS, Broadcom and the other stupid manufacturers should stop behaving
like a bunch of idiots and just put hardware docs on FTP like realtek, & VIA do.
 

Stallman & Torvalds go chanting around that we got a Free Kernel. Get a grip. Many drivers
are just a bunch of hexadecimal hacks with no comments explaining how things work. 
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://discuss.lugm.org/pipermail/discuss_discuss.lugm.org/attachments/20120104/b8e6ee00/attachment.html>