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Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!news.cs.su.oz.au!metro!metro!asstdc.scgt.oz.au!nsw.news.telstra.net!act.news.telstra.net!psgrain!newsfeed.internetmci.com!swrinde!tank.news.pipex.net!pipex!usenet1.news.uk.psi.net!uknet!EU.net!Austria.EU.net!siemens.at!not-for-mail From: mingo@pc5829.hil.siemens.co.at (Ingo Molnar) Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc Subject: Re: Linux vs. FreeBSD ... Date: 23 May 1996 07:19:31 GMT Organization: Siemens AG Austria Lines: 33 Message-ID: <4o13i3$tp@news.siemens.at> References: <3188C1E2.45AE@onramp.net> <318FD68B.60AD12F6@lambert.org> <4mouan$cpb@agate.berkeley.edu> <4mpch5$97t@ennui.ops.best.com> <4mplph$n1s@agate.berkeley.edu> <319165C5.58D1E2F7@lambert.org> <4n9u6q$ien@news.siemens.at> <319BDC0B.75DDA671@lambert.org> NNTP-Posting-Host: pc5829.hil.siemens-austria X-Newsreader: TIN [UNIX 1.3 BETA-950824-color PL0] Terry Lambert (terry@lambert.org) wrote: [ should buggy (non-working) hardware be supported ] : Hack drivers will not render bad hardware good. Bad hardware : is bad, independent of whether or not there are hack drivers : for it. : : Making bad hardware run does not ennoble hack drivers. Hack : drivers are bad, independent of whether or not they cause bad : hardware to function. device drivers have a secondary role, from the point of view of source code quality. They are of course the "salt" in any OS. but it really doesnt render your OS useless or less clean ... there are alot of device drivers with code quality ranging from "perfect" to "poor". i would agree with you if we .... had to support 100000 buggy MMUs, which ... make it impossible to support 2 levels of paging ... this would be a compromise "right in the heart of the OS", which would be inacceptable. but device drivers come and go ... and people >depend< on drivers, and they only see: "FreeBSD doesnt work with my CDROM" or "Linux doesnt work with my drive". If you were a hard-core purist, then you would have never touched any PC keyboard ... -- mingo