Are hardware vendors starting to bail on FreeBSD ... ?

[Marc G. Fournier]

... and is there anything we can do as a community to prevent it?

I've been a FreeBSD users since '94, and proud of it ... and have 
vehemently defended, all the way, my decision to use it vs 'the dark side' 
...

Although my above subject is a more "general call", my big beef right now 
is with RAID controller vendors, but I don't believe that the problem is 
specific to them, so hopefully others will ring in ...

I've used several different controllers over the years ... Adaptec was my 
first love, but I've used Intel, 3Ware, and, more recently, HPs ... out of 
the lot, I'd have to say the least supported (HP) has turned out to be the 
more pleasurable one to use, since checking the status of the RAID array 
is the easiest:

# camcontrol devlist
<COMPAQ RAID 1  VOLUME OK>         at scbus0 target 0 lun 0 (da0,pass0)

but, as an example, Intel used to be really nice, in that I could run the
storcon utility (under FreeBSD 4.x) that Intel provided on their web site 
to actually see the whole BIOS and view drives, etc ... it was a dream ... 
but it looks like they stop'd support for FreeBSD at 5.x :(

I just read a recent thread about monitoring RAID controllers on one of 
hte lists (this one?) where someone mentioned that Adaptec's Official 
stand is that they don't support storage management under FreeBSD ... but, 
in ports, we have the older aaccli interface, which I understand doesn't 
work with newer controllers ...

So, my question above, and a public call to -core, or anyone else:

   What can we, as a community, due to improve this situation?

Its not enough anymore to know a piece of hardware *works* with FreeBSD, 
but more that the vendor is willing to acknowledge us as a market ... 
petitions don't do anything, IMHO ... it all falls to 'money talks' for 
most vendors (not all of them, but alot of them) ...

Is there anything we can do?

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Marc G. Fournier           Hub.Org Networking Services (http://www.hub.org)
Email . scrappy at hub.org                              MSN . scrappy at hub.org
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