14 Mar
2007
14 Mar
'07
5:54 p.m.
On 3/14/07, Maarten de Boer <mdeboer(a)iua.upf.edu> wrote:
Heh, I forgot about that one - vendors who keep their source closed so
they can lie about the capabilities of the hardware. I suspect they
marketed a fakeraid (aka software RAID implemented at driver level)
device as hardware RAID. This is common in sound drivers too -
devices are advertised as supporting "hardware AC3/DTS/whatever
encoding" while in fact the driver does it in software.
Lee
I think you
misread my technical statement as a political one. I
don't care about politics or the GPL, I just want Linux to be the most
stable OS, and that can't happen if secret blobs of code are allowed
to scribble all over kernel memory.
I have an additional argument against binary drivers. Some years ago,
we had a server with a Highpoint IDE RAID controller. We bought it
because the Highpoint actually had an "open source driver" tgz for it
on it on its webpage. It turned out though that this "open source
driver" was a binary blob with some "open source" kernel glue code
around it (just like the nvidia and ati drivers). Anyway, too late to
go back, we used the controller with the binary driver, kernel 2.4.
After a while had to to upgrade to a 2.6 kernel, but Highpoint only
provided a 2.4 driver. This caused a lot of trouble.