5 ms·
More eyes on a design would help. Proprietary SOCs suck when you run into a bug in system bring-up (and if you are going off the beaten track even a little, yo
by kabdib 6y ago
More eyes on a design would help.
Proprietary SOCs suck when you run into a bug in system bring-up (and if you are going off the beaten track even a little, you will), and you have a vendor that:
- Doesn't believe you. In fact, is quite vocal about not believing you.
- Takes your hard-won repro code (with "a possible workaround, what do you think?") and is silent for months;
- Finally publishes a TR about that bug, along with your very own workaround code, verbatim and unattributed and you never even got an email acknowledging the issue.
... and after nearly a year of chasing the stupid thing down, as a last resort grants you a five minute phone audience with the chip designer. Sixty seconds into the problem description he says, "Oh, I know what's going on..." and proceeds to fix everything by telling you what parts of the documentation are lies. Your workaround turns out to be how you have to do it. You feel a little ill.
An open source SOC would not necessarily be better understood by more people, but it probably couldn't be worse.
- jasonjayr 6y agoThat sounds oddly specific, are you okay?
- ohazi 6y agoI've had something closely resembling what OP described happen to me twice. In both cases the relevant chip errata document is behind an NDA, but in one of them my bug was the first one on the list. That one was a "don't use these particular memory locations, or disable the cache (which makes the chip unusably slow)" kind of bug, and I'm still simultaneously amazed that I managed to figure it out and angry that I had to.
- monocasa 6y agoBeen in a similar position too. Didn't end up getting it added to the errata since we reported it against an engineering sample, but just added a sentence about how 'this status bit flag is "unreliable"' buried somewhere in the middle of the first public release of the reference manual without any warnings as to what that implies downstream. At least it went in the real docs I guess. But this was after them ghosting us about this, so the whole encounter still left a bad taste in my mouth.
- octoberfranklin 6y agoThe NDA problem in the SoC world is completely out of control.
- deepstack 6y agothese are the best comments in HNews! It amazing the amount of incompetence there are in tech industry now days.
- kabdib 6y agoI'm fine, thanks for asking :-) It was a specific example, one of many from a vendor that I will not name, and over a decade ago.
- detaro 6y agoAnd sadly, actually getting to talk to someone at the end is the impressive part here from what I've seen...
- andi999 6y agoWhy do you feel ill? This is how building up expert knowledge works.
- Doxin 6y agoBecause their year-long arduous journey could, apparently, be avoided with a 60 second chat with the right person.
- andi999 6y agoYes. Even in tech it comes down, it doesnt matter what you know, it matters whom you know.
- meditative 6y ago> it doesnt matter what you know, it matters whom you know. while technically the literal reading of your sentence is not incorrect, the phrase above is referring to nepotism which is not the issue OP has.
- tinus_hn 6y agoWould you have accepted his answer though? It was the same answer given in the first place.
- andi999 6y agoWhat do you mean by accepting his answer? What alternative do you propose.
- kabdib 6y agoI would have believed the chip designer. He explained the problem (an issue involving synchronization between different clock domains in this case) and why the workaround (that WE had to figure out, without help from the vendor) was correct. The sample drivers written by the company were all buggy, by the way. They wound up doing a cut-and-paste with our workaround in their next board support drop.