Why I think FC3 sucks!

Gene Heskett gene.heskett at verizon.net
Sat Jan 29 01:30:13 UTC 2005


On Friday 28 January 2005 03:18, Paul Howarth wrote:
>On Thu, 2005-01-27 at 18:33 -0500, Dave Jones wrote:
>> On Thu, Jan 27, 2005 at 06:31:04PM -0500, Jim Cornette wrote:
>>  > - Some drivers are intentionally deleted because "nobody has
>>  > this hardware any longer".
>>
>> Examples please ? We support some pretty arcane stuff, so if the
>> driver still builds fine, isn't a potential security disaster
>> waiting to happen, and doesn't impact overall maintainence of the
>> kernel package, I'm happy to reconsider any drivers if theres
>> sufficient demand. (And in some cases, I've enabled stuff on
>> request from a single user as the driver made sense to enable).
>
>How about the advansys driver? A number of people have asked about
> this at various times:
>
>https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=111232
>https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=112795
>https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=120446
>https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=124018
>
>I still use one of these cards myself and the driver is still part
> of the mainline kernel, though not built by default. The driver
> code is at least partly maintained though, because it changes
> between releases. It's sufficiently important for me that I
> maintain a web page showing how to use an Advansys SCSI card in
> Fedora Core (http://www.city-
> fan.org/ftp/contrib/drivers/advansys/) and the feedback I get
> suggests that I'm far from the only one still using them.
>
>Paul.

I'd probably be in at least one of those messages above.  There for a 
while it worked right well, but when the decided to undo the 
request_region fixes, it either went to hell, or 3 different tape 
drives did.

The card itself is a very well designed and built card, with far less 
than the normal amount of virgin sacrificing needed to get the 
terminations 100% functional.  For instance, a $0.75 schotkey diode 
is used in the hosts 5 volt isolation diode position, something all 
card makers should do, but don't, they use a 5 cent si type 
sacrificing half a volt of the precious 5 volts available for term 
power, so you wind up sacrificing virgins to get the terminations to 
work well enough to function in a lot of cases. 

But, they wouldn't support it for all the fixes and so called races 
they claimed it needed but were never able to show me an example of 
even though I did ask, for the 2.6 kernels, so its out of my machine, 
probably forever, and I'm now using a 200GB hard drive with amanda.

Its one of the better built scsi2-fast narrow cards ever to come down 
the pike, and dropping support was, and still is IMO, a huge mistake.  
They were looking at the code, and not the hardware.  The hardware is 
great.

>--
>Paul Howarth <paul at city-fan.org>

-- 
Cheers, Gene
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