SUCCESS: Sun Blade 100 with Firewire-attached HDD (IEEE 1394)

[David O'Brien]

On Tue, Jun 07, 2005 at 12:08:20AM +0200, Marius Strobl wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 06, 2005 at 11:40:48PM +0200, Ralf-Philipp Weinmann wrote:
> > The FreeBSD/sparc64 5.4R Hardware Notes list this machine as "fully
> > supported" (section 2.1). This seems odd to me, since it is clearly NOT
> >  the case. Without this patch, the controller simply wasn't initialized
> > correctly.
> 
> Yeah, the sparc64 hardware notes have to be read in the context of
> the time when they where written which was mainly when e.g. the
> MD PCI code was fixed to work on stuff like E450 and some of the
> weirder USII[e,i] based systems etc. From a today's perspective they
> sound more like propaganda...

I feel the language is fine.  For entire existence of the FreeBSD/sparc64
I've never missed firewire or floppy on my SunBlade 100.  When we wrote
the notes, "fully supported" mean the CPU, on-board disk controller (ATA
or SCSI), NIC, and sio(4) were fully supported.  For typical development
and server deployment that is all that was needed.

There are devices found on some i386 machines that we don't support
(wireless NIC and modem, usb2 for a long time), yet most would consider
them "fully supported".

-- 
-- David  (obrien at FreeBSD.org)