<html><body><div style="color:#000; background-color:#fff; font-family:times new roman, new york, times, serif;font-size:12pt"><div>Hello,</div><div><br></div><div>Happy new year.</div><div><br></div><div>I got an Asus P5SD2-VM as a gift. Eager as I was, I ran openbsd-current</div><div>on it.</div><div><br></div><div>The install failed, and I had to do a PXE boot install.</div><div><br></div><div>After the installation, I tried to insert a CDROM and boom ! Complete freeze.</div><div><br></div><div>The freeze turned out to be a bug in the DMA of the onboard IDE controller.</div><div><br></div><div>None of this is documented on the SiS website ! SiS doesn't think it shouldn't<br></div><div>inform its customers about those defects. The large open source vendors (Linux,</div><div>OpenSolaris ?, and freebsd) do not push for hardware documentation to be available.</div><div><br></div><div>This is a problem which has been plaguing open source for years. If SiS
had an office</div><div>in mauritius, I would have staged a sit-in protest. <br></div><div><br></div><div>I'm sick of wading through linux source code to get clues about how some crappy piece</div><div>of IDE controller is supposed to work. IDE is OLD technology, what's the use of locking</div><div>documentation ? SiS, Broadcom and the other stupid manufacturers should stop behaving</div><div>like a bunch of idiots and just put hardware docs on FTP like realtek, & VIA do.</div><div> <br></div><div>Stallman & Torvalds go chanting around that we got a Free Kernel. Get a grip. Many drivers</div><div>are just a bunch of hexadecimal hacks with no comments explaining how things work. <br></div><div><br></div></div></body></html>