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Just a few hours ago on the irc channel of OpenBSD someone said that OpenBSD is good at not letting a wonky hardware run compared to linux. So you could use the

Just a few hours ago on the irc channel of OpenBSD someone said that OpenBSD is good at not letting a wonky hardware run compared to linux. So you could use the dmesg and ask it in the OpenBSD mailing list and they will point out which wonky hardware is causing trouble and you can replace that problematic part. I ran OpenBSD current for 6 years and never faced such issue

hylaride 11mo ago
Years ago (circa ~2005) I was working for a company with a mix of OpenBSD, FreeBSD, Windows, and Linux. I was more of a fan of OpenBSD and I received a lot of grief when the OpenBSD team suddenly ripped out support for one of the Dell hardware RAID controllers (I don't remember which one, but IIRC it was one based on something from Adaptec), claiming they couldn't reliably reverse engineer it to create stable drivers. Their attempts ultimately always ended up with "random" corruption. A year or so later our main DB on Windows (long story on why we were running windows DBs with most of the other kit being BSD/Linux) had a total corruption incident (it was painful, but we had a replica failover that we recovered from) - turns out we could get an answer from Dell since Windows was obviously supported by Dell themselves. There was a known issue with that model of RAID controller that would result in random and total corruption - and there was no way to fix it in firmware. I was smug about it, but had to concede that people should still be given an informed choice. IIRC Dell was very quiet about it, which is certainly not "informed choice". Had we known, we'd have shelled out for different hardware for our databases!
- cyberpunk 11mo ago
  Hangon on a second, you paid dell support and they knowingly let you run production on kit with known total irreversible data loss bugs? Da. Fuq?!?
  - hylaride 11mo ago
    To be fair, there was not much Dell could do as their PERC cards were all rebranded Adaptec and later LSI. Adaptec was the gold standard for ages, but I assume was enshitified somewhere along the way. The long term result was that the entire hardware raid world ditched Adaptec for LSI and/or software RAID (eg ZFS). Dell (in those days, not sure if it's still the case) had excellent support. There was a bug on another server model where the onboard video card would eventually fail and fry the motherboard. Even years later out of support, Dell would for free replace it if it failed with whatever new model equivalent existed. I left the company before things were totally resolved, but I think dell ultimately gave people who complained LSI cards, but it took awhile for those to be designed and manufactured to fit the internal drive slot. Most people who were also using external arrays moved to third party ones or other hardware. Some background from an OpenBSD dev: https://nickh.org/warstories/adaptec.html https://nickh.org/warstories/adaptec.html

hylaride 11mo ago

Years ago (circa ~2005) I was working for a company with a mix of OpenBSD, FreeBSD, Windows, and Linux. I was more of a fan of OpenBSD and I received a lot of grief when the OpenBSD team suddenly ripped out support for one of the Dell hardware RAID controllers (I don't remember which one, but IIRC it was one based on something from Adaptec), claiming they couldn't reliably reverse engineer it to create stable drivers. Their attempts ultimately always ended up with "random" corruption. A year or so later our main DB on Windows (long story on why we were running windows DBs with most of the other kit being BSD/Linux) had a total corruption incident (it was painful, but we had a replica failover that we recovered from) - turns out we could get an answer from Dell since Windows was obviously supported by Dell themselves. There was a known issue with that model of RAID controller that would result in random and total corruption - and there was no way to fix it in firmware. I was smug about it, but had to concede that people should still be given an informed choice. IIRC Dell was very quiet about it, which is certainly not "informed choice". Had we known, we'd have shelled out for different hardware for our databases!

cyberpunk 11mo ago
Hangon on a second, you paid dell support and they knowingly let you run production on kit with known total irreversible data loss bugs? Da. Fuq?!?
- hylaride 11mo ago
  To be fair, there was not much Dell could do as their PERC cards were all rebranded Adaptec and later LSI. Adaptec was the gold standard for ages, but I assume was enshitified somewhere along the way. The long term result was that the entire hardware raid world ditched Adaptec for LSI and/or software RAID (eg ZFS). Dell (in those days, not sure if it's still the case) had excellent support. There was a bug on another server model where the onboard video card would eventually fail and fry the motherboard. Even years later out of support, Dell would for free replace it if it failed with whatever new model equivalent existed. I left the company before things were totally resolved, but I think dell ultimately gave people who complained LSI cards, but it took awhile for those to be designed and manufactured to fit the internal drive slot. Most people who were also using external arrays moved to third party ones or other hardware. Some background from an OpenBSD dev: https://nickh.org/warstories/adaptec.html https://nickh.org/warstories/adaptec.html