Improving FreeBSD's hardware compatibility

[Peter Jeremy]

On Fri, 2006-Jul-21 09:42:40 +0800, Intron wrote:
>Oliver Fromme wrote:
>>Yeah, most of which are crap.  :-)   The raw number of
>>drivers says _nothing_ about hardware vendors' support.
>
>This is a problem of code quality.

A driver that is effectively unusable is no better than no driver
at all.  The FreeBSD prefers to expend developer resources on
providing a smaller number of drivers but have them actually work.

>But at least Linux community has so many volunteers/vendors to write
>drivers.

quantity != quality

On Fri, 2006-Jul-21 11:18:07 +0800, Intron wrote:
>3. Philips SAA 7130/7134, TV decoder
>   This is one of the most popular TV decoder chips on the market.
>The data sheet can be obtained from the vendor, just as what Linux
>community has done.

You are wrong in two respects here.
a) The publicly available datasheet does not provide programming details.
   The programming details are only available under NDA.
b) FreeBSD _does_ have a driver for this chipset, available from
   download.purpe.com - which I am successfully using.

>     Although not all data sheets have been publicized by vendors, but
>at least FreeBSDers can follow/keep up with Linux community, cannot we?

Feel free to contribute.

-- 
Peter Jeremy
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