Buslogic PCI controllers _no longer recommended_ by FreeBSD team

[Jordan K. Hubbard]

In the past, I've publically endorsed Buslogic's products highly in these
newsgroups and have had only the best things to say about their
tech support.  They were always more than cooperative in their support
for free operating systems, providing technical details on their products
when requested and always being quick to send PROM upgrades to customers
with a simple phone call.

Well, it greatly saddens me to say that things have clearly taken
a turn for the worse at Buslogic.  Not only have they introduced
a number of serious bugs in their latest firmware for the Bt946,
but their tech support has become essentially non-existent.  Multiple phone
calls from numerous FreeBSD users (including several on the core team)
have gone unanswered, and hold times of up to an hour are not uncommon
(after which we've always hung up, so it's uncertain as to whether they'd
have simply left us there all day :-).  This is not just an anomaly
in their phone system, as multiple messages left with tech support
and the central operator have also gone completely unreturned.

It is therefore incumbent upon me to withdraw my previous endorsement
of Buslogic and recommend instead that users rely on the Adaptec 2940
or NCR PCI cards, both of which are well supported in FreeBSD
2.0-950412-SNAP and later.

Perhaps Buslogic will turn this around in the future, and if so I certainly
would welcome their return to "most favored controller status", but
until that comes to pass I must regretfully recommend to our users that
they avoid Buslogic products for any FreeBSD (or, for that matter, any
other operating system) configuration.

						Jordan