[HEADSUP] IPX and NWFS to be killed in -current.

[Robert Watson]

On Mon, 6 Dec 2004, Poul-Henning Kamp wrote:

> We are aiming 6.X at production readiness around start of 2006. 
> 
> By that time IPX and NWFS are not really interesting and nobody seems to
> be interested in doing the SMPng work on them. 
> 
> I propose we remove them from -current before the 6.x freeze starts next
> spring. 

FYI, I have a substantial work in progress in the netperf branch to bring
fine-grained locking to IPX/SPX, as well as to clean up a number of
elements of its implementions (for example, moving the the queue(9) 
macros.  While I'm currently a bit stalled on it due to being overwhelmed
at work (etc), my hope was to get the Giant-free IPX pieces working early
next year.  I think there's a reference to this on the SMPng page showing
the task as last worked on in April (probably accurate).  I don't have the
ability to experiment with or test the nwfs code at this time.  However,
there are occasional bug reports so one assumes that someone must be using
it.  I'm not necessarily opposed to removing IPX/SPX on the basis that it
is hardly a mainstream protocol component anymore, but I think it's
probably not accurate to say that no one is interested in doing the
locking work for the IPX parts (since I'm working on it :-).

Robert N M Watson             FreeBSD Core Team, TrustedBSD Projects
robert at fledge.watson.org      Principal Research Scientist, McAfee Research