I originally wrote this back in about August, and WordPress apparently lost it during an upgrade or something. Most likely the fault of a beta version of WordPress.

I have a bit of egg on my face. I trusted the LSI people a bit too much. There was a critical race problem in their driver for the 84016E … to their credit they fixed it in June. I found a workaround before we figured that bit out, thank god Solaris’ fault management systems, psradm to the rescue, since it was a race problem with unaligned mutexes, using that and offlining all the other CPUs solved it a treat. To LSI’s discredit they updated some pages but not others. I installed 1.17 driver version, current was 1.23. If you looked at the 84016E page the day I downloaded it was 1.17. Sun pointed out 1.23 was available on the 8888ELP page. I downloaded and installed that, very happy from then on out. To LSI’s credit there was a human answering the phone immediately, late Sunday, who could get someone working on the problem right away. I’d already worked around the issue so was ok to let it sit till first thing Monday AM. Even Sunday, immediately got a person who was willing and able to start a case, get it in front of their actual-people-who-do-the-development.

Despite the page update issues, and crash, LSI wins for having support (and english to boot) and being ready and willing to at least try to solve the problem. If it were an emergency still they were willing to (for a *reasonable* hourly fee mind you) get someone working on it right away that Sunday even. I call this a Good Thing. So, despite the VERY rough start LSI still wins me over in the end because of customer support.