[rescue] derail to Adaptec/Linux [Re: NeXTSTEP or OPENSTEP?]

[Patrick Giagnocavo]

In retrospect, it was disappointing to see the FUD machine up close and
personal, in terms of the outright lies coming from MSFT (and they were
lies).

However, it later came back to bite them, in that many OS/2 users,
disappointed in how IBM mis-handled things, got turned on to Linux.

And we know how Linux has been an ever-larger thorn in MSFT's side ever
since... the web server market share for Linux is ~62 to 67% and even in
all server hardware sales Linux is a respectable 28%.

Myself, I used OS2 for a while, then, tried my hand at Yggdrasil and
Slackware, then NEXTSTEP, then back to Linux.

On Thu, Aug 7, 2014 at 10:34 AM, Phil Stracchino <phils at caerllewys.net>
wrote:

> On 08/07/14 12:18, pakenned-list at pobox.com wrote:
> > So, I'm derailing a bit--no experience with OS/2, but knew people who
> > were real devotees in the early/mid-nineties.
> >
> >> Impressive! I wasn't that hardcore. I tried Slackware on the OS/2
> >> laptop but I never got it working -- setting the right parameters for
> >> the aha152x kernel module defeated me.
> >
> > I was a slackware user (first booted and run from floppies in 2MB of
> > RAM, oh my.  This is a rescue story of another sort for later) and had
> > some experience with mucking with Adaptec hardware and drivers.
>
> Yup, yup ...  I used Slackware for a long time.  As a basis.  I
> eventually abandoned it because manual dependency management became
> unmanageable.  I remember once having to abandon an attempted upgrade
> from Slackware 7 to Slackware 9.1 because too much of what I was already
> doing was enough newer that Slackware 9.1 didn't support it.
>
>
> > Adaptec on Linux was a particularly awful moving target.  I had some ISA
> > (heh) SCSI cards and they were better than nothing.  I got an UW card,
> > and could not rid myself of SCSI daemons.  Research into support
> > revealed developers complaining that Adaptec had released yet another
> > version of a chip that reported itself the same way.  It was a game of
> > cat and mouse where the user was the loser.  It made buying a card hit
> > and miss--who knows whether you are getting something that's supported
> > or not.  They were cheap, but not worth it.
>
> The drivers were a bit shaky, too.  I spent a while once troubleshooting
> persistent kernel panics that appeared to be associated with operations
> on a tape drive connected to an AHA1542, and ended up going through the
> aha152x/154x source code once and cleaning up something like about a
> dozen double-free bugs where the code wasn't checking to see whether a
> memory pointer was already NULL.  That ended up being my first code
> accepted into the Linux mainline kernel.
>
>
> > I read (maybe in the source code?) about how BusLogic willingly provided
> > documentation and engineer time supporting some person in the Linux
> > community who was writing the driver.
> >
> > I bought (a more expensive) BusLogic card and it was like night and day
> > (and thus started a migration away from Adaptec cards in my machines).
>
> Yup, I had great success for a long time with BusLogic SCSI adapters on
> Linux.
>
>
> --
>   Phil Stracchino
>   Babylon Communications
>   phils at caerllewys.net
>   phil at co.ordinate.org
>   Landline: 603.293.8485
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