jgreco
Resident Grinch
- Joined
- May 29, 2011
- Messages
- 18,680
For what it's worth, under Free BSD 8.0 beta, with the beta version of ZFS, the crappy cheap SATA port multipliers in my numerous massive drive chassis worked flawlessly.
Well anyways hi, nice to meetcha, I hear a lot of your frustrations and I even share some of them. I'm not going to try to address your post on a point by point basis as it is kind of a mix of fact, perspective, exasperation, and even some error. jkh can speak up if he wants to but I don't wish to engage on the topic, except to say that yes, those of us who are busy deploying FreeBSD have at times had to work around the bad parts. Most definitely including FreeBSD 5 (didn't get further here than the lab) and FreeBSD 6 (got a small number of systems in production before deciding it was a SMP train wreck).
As someone who's done some device driver work in the past, though, and who has extensive experience with PC hardware, I'm going to go out on a bit of a limb here and point out that Linux also doesn't have support for "all hardware," and that the PC market is plagued by its inherent nature. It is actually very difficult to cope with the stream of knockoff hardware that emits from Shenzhen and other tech manufacturing ghettos, particularly when they work so hard to manufacture stuff that looks authentic (including knockoff Intel ethernet controllers, LSI HBA's, etc). And that's on the server side of things, where there's substantial profit potential. I have no idea why someone would try to manufacture something like knockoff Prolific PL2303's but apparently they do. Stuff like SATA controllers and SATA port multipliers are even worse as they sit in that middle ground of stuff that is just profitable enough... and as long as someone can code a Windows driver that works plausibly well for at least an hour or two between crashes, it's deemed acceptable quality. It's often not even knockoff grade, it's just what I like to call "PC grade."
Given enough coders and enough vaguely broken hardware, yes, FreeBSD could be made to work on it all. Linux has more coders working at more edge cases these days. FreeBSD is a smaller, higher quality project, in my opinion - it does not strive to work on every possible bit of PC hardware, and that's probably a good thing in some ways. But it means that you build a machine to suit the OS, rather than picking random hardware and then expecting the OS to behave flawlessly.
We know certain things are well-supported and will work well. Twenty years ago that was an Adaptec 1542 and a SMC ethernet card. Today it's an LSI HBA and an Intel ethernet card.
Cyberjock is busily guiding as many people as he can to the things that he knows works. I respect that. It's quite an undertaking and he does a hell of a job. Please don't be too critical of him for providing his opinion to you, for free, as a member of the community. The people who are "official" respresentatives of the company are conspicuously labeled as "FreeNAS Core Team" or otherwise readily identifiable as iX employees. Please remember that the rest of us are here voluntarily and aren't paid by iX to provide assistance to others in the community.