[Info-vax] Working with broken hardware, was: Re: DECnet Phase IV broken after VSI update

[Bill Gunshannon]

On 11/6/21 4:42 PM, Simon Clubley wrote:
> On 2021-11-06, Robert A. Brooks <FIRST.LAST at vmssoftware.com> wrote:
>>
>> Unless they are referring back to the mid-90's when the early PCI Ethernet
>> adapters on Alphas were not-so-great, that info is a bit stale.
>>
>> VMS Engineering (specifically, the guy who's been writing our Ethernet drivers
>> for over 30 years) has stated that auto-negotiate should always be used.
>>
>> If it doesn't work, he'll fix it, or determine that the switch is non-conforming
>> to the standard.
>>
> 
> That's a very interesting way of expressing that and leads to a more
> interesting general question:
> 
> Does VMS support hardware which doesn't correctly implement a standard
> (by implementing a workaround as Linux tends to do), or has VMS Engineering
> over the decades outright said that it doesn't follow the standards,
> so it's broken, so we won't support it ?
> 
> If it's the latter, is that going to change for x86-64 VMS, given some
> of the hardware out there ?
> 

I don't think that's an issue as it has been stated from the
beginning that VMS was not going to support everything but
only a certain subset of systems and components.

bill