Hitchhiker's Guide to Openbsd

12.1.4 - I have a card listed as "supported", but it doesn't work!
Unfortunately, many manufacturers use product model numbers to indicate marketplace position, rather 
than the technical nature of a product. For this reason, you may buy a product with the same name or 
model number as a product listed in the 
platform pages
, but end up with a totally different product that 
may not work with OpenBSD. For example, many early wireless network adapters were based on the 
Prism2 chip set, using the (
wi(4)
) driver, but later, when lower-cost chips became available, many 
manufacturers changed their product to use chips for which no open source drivers exist, but never 
changed their model numbers. Wireless network adapters, unfortunately, are far from the only example 
of this. 
12.1.5 - Are WinModems supported?
WinModems are low-cost modems which rely on the processor to do much of the signal processing 
normally done in hardware in a "real" modem. Due to the variety of incompatible and typically 
undocumented WinModem chips, there is no support for WinModems in OpenBSD, and this is not 
likely to change. 
12.1.6 - What happened to the Adaptec RAID support (aac)?
Adaptec has refused to provide useful and accurate documentation about their FSA-based (
aac(4)
) RAID 
controllers. As these RAID controllers seem to be very buggy, this documentation is critical for a useful 
driver. Since this driver was so unreliable, it was removed from the GENERIC kernel. 
I can compile my own kernel with aac(4) support, right?
Sure. But what part of "unreliable" did you fail to understand? This isn't an "experimental" feature, this 
is a known-flawed driver. Maybe it works with some variations of hardware sufficiently well to be 
usable, but we don't recommend betting your data on it. 
12.1.7 - My ami(4) card will only support one logical disk!
There is a known bug with 
ami(4)
 which will cause data corruption if you use more than one volume on 
some controllers. On controllers with this issue, OpenBSD will limit you to one logical disk, resulting in 
a message in your dmesg that looks like: 
http://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq12.html (4 of 12)9/4/2011 10:02:18 AM

---

12 - Hardware and Platform-Specific Questions
ami0: FW A.04.03, BIOS vA.04.03, 4MB RAM
ami0: 3 channels, 16 targets, 2 logical drives
ami0: firmware buggy, limiting access to first logical disk
scsibus0 at ami0: 1 targets