Contributed by phessler on from the Live Free or Die dept.
Theo mentioned: "This is a very very small subset of things that are not supported, and we have to take on industry after industry. We took on ethernet, and won. We took on scsi, and won. We took on raid, and won."
What you can do: http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=openbsd-misc&m=109519653610773&w=2
Reasons why unfree drivers aren't allowed in the tree: http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=openbsd-misc&m=109519932105627&w=2
In short:
* Most devices are supported, because almost all vendors are good about documentation
* Go complain to the closed vendors
* Find an alternate product, and tell the closed vendor about it
* Shut up and try to write it yourself
* Pay someone to reverse engineer
If you have pertinent contact information for these vendors, please feel free to post it in a reply.
(Comments are closed)
By Anonymous Coward (142.166.108.150) on
It is unfortunate that binary only driver support has been making so many gains (acceptance-wise) in the Linux world. In the long term nothing good will come of it.
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By mirabilos (212.185.103.56) tg@66h.42h.de on http://mirbsd.de/
(or even NetBSD) "if it had nVidia drivers".
I'm regularily telling them to shut up and ask nvidia themselfes (I
even mailed them (for OpenBSD drivers), but didn't get a reply at
all), but all they can do is whine and continue to use GNU/Linux or
Windows.
(Well, maybe they're better off with that, but then, some of these
are actually quite knowledgeable in Unices and just too lazy to dual-
boot when wanting to play some first person shooter (I do), that's
why it's a pity.)
Good Luck!
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By mirabilos (212.185.103.56) on
By Anonymous Coward (142.179.200.15) on
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By mirabilos (212.185.103.56) on
(look at XF4/xc/config/cf/OpenBSD.cf).
The problem is: DRI looks for a suitable DRM (kernel module) and
just blanks the screen (eg. xlock -mode gears) if it doesn't find
one, instead of using MesaGL as usual.
Another problem: there are a couple of DRMs in XFree86, but they
use the FBSD bsd.kmod.mk, not our bsd.lkm.mk - no workee...
(I don't think they'd compile anyway.)
By Anonymous Coward (208.252.48.163) on
Sounds like a great way to get people to switch. *groan*
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By Fábio Olivé Leite (161.114.1.185) on
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By Stephen Paskaluk (129.128.138.50) on
Too bad the signal to noise ratio is almost zero as it is now, at least on misc@.
By phessler (208.201.244.164) on
By Anonymous Coward (69.197.92.181) on
Come on, there's no need to lie. Just having a driver doesn't mean it supported. Look at Dlink 580 quad nics, if you do any serious traffic, they stop working. Or some nics not working with multicast. GigE nics without support for interupt coalecing and the rest of the features that make high performance GigE work. Or how about the fact that there is not a single supported raid controller of any kind? Just because you can use an already configured array, doesn't mean its supported. If you won these companies over, why can't I query the status of my array? Or rebuild it?
Pretending that bitching to vendors works doesn't make it true. They don't care about a tiny minority of people. All those millions of people buying shit from Dell is all they need.
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By krh (207.75.178.228) on
If something doesn't work, file a bug report. Posting to undeadly will not help.
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By henning (199.185.136.137) henning@openbsd on
if he had actually cared he knew that, to just pick two of his pseudo-arguments, the dlink-580 (ste) issues have been solved in 3.6, and most of the drivers with multicast issues have been fixed.
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By Anonymous Coward (69.197.92.181) on
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By Anonymous Coward (213.89.247.82) on
By Anonymous Coward (69.197.92.181) on
By Anonymous Coward (218.214.35.235) on
It seems silly to me that they would be actively pursuing a path that makes their hardware less desirable to users, given that the margins on their hardware is the thing keeping their company afloat - by the same token, it will be what kills the company if it is neglected, and potential new users and operational niches ( like OpenBSD-powered firewalls and VPN boxes ) are alienated.