On Fri, 26 Sep 2003, Greg A. Woods wrote:

> [ On Thursday, September 25, 2003 at 21:14:25 (+0100), Shane M. Coughlan wrote: ]
> > Subject: Re: NetBSD being used as the core for secure OS distro
> >
> > I may regret asking this, but what known limitations are likely to come and
> > bit me (especially on the i386 flavour of the system)?
>
> There's much more current i386 hardware support in FreeBSD than in
> NetBSD across the board, especially if you consider FreeBSD 5.1 (though
> 5.1 is really not ready for general production use in my opinion).
>
> One example I'm quite familiar with is the "ahc" driver.  The
> NetBSD-current version has been updated to be on par with FreeBSD,
> however the version still used on the netbsd-1-6 branch is very dated
> and won't work very well, if at all, with any recent Adaptec card in
> combination with any recent high-end SCSI drives (where "recent"
> includes the last year or _two_, depending on specifics).  (I'm working
> on getting a back-ported version of "ahc" tested and hopefully it can be
> pulled up for 1.6.2.)

By the way, the new driver is currently broken for VLB. There have
been other complaints, too. There are multiple open PR's. Don't get me
wrong; I'm glad it's in current -- I have a computer with an aic79899
dual port Ultra160 which tops out as an "80" on netbsd-1-6 -- but I
myself would not like to see it pulled up to netbsd-1-6 until some of
those bugs were fixed.

Frederick