Intel Controllers [Rant]

[Mark Felder]

On Mon, Dec 9, 2013, at 18:20, Barney Cordoba wrote:
> Why is it that every time I get a new MB it has yet-another intel
> controller on it? How are you supposed to write good drivers that support
> 9000 different controllers? As much as I appreciate the progression of
> CPU technology, they
> would serve the community better by making up their damn minds and just
> build 1 or 2 controller for each 
> target market.
> 

I'm pretty sure an entirely new driver doesn't need to be written for
each new controller. I assume like with most things (network cards, wifi
chips, etc) it's usually a matter of adding its identifier to the driver
code.

It might be a foolish idea, but I've wondered for a while why drivers
can't pick up a list of IDs from a file on the filesystem which could be
distributed by, say, freebsd-update and then new ISOs could be rolled to
include them.

This probably presents too many layers of complexity and potential
security issues, though. :-)