netatm: plan for removal unless an active maintainer is found

[M. Warner Losh]

In message: <20060315151058.c85pw3x14wkkk8g0 at netchild.homeip.net>
            Alexander Leidinger <Alexander at Leidinger.net> writes:
: Robert Watson <rwatson at freebsd.org> wrote:
: 
: > The other large chunk of non-MPSAFE network device driver and stack 
: > code, FYI, is the i4b code.  In principle, a newly added committed is
: 
: The USB stack is also a part of the problem (USB network interfaces), I
: think.

It definitely is a problem.  And I didn't list any usb interfaces as
not being MPSAFE.

: > now available to work on the capi integration, and hopefully will do 
: > the SMP safety work as part of that.  If not, it's also on the 
: > chopping block.  It's a significant piece of otherwise unmaintained 
: > code, and something that's not trivially testable (at least, not by 
: > me or anyone I've talked to lately :-).  I don't want to see it leave 
: > the tree, but it needs to be updated so that it can run MPSAFE before 
: > 7.0.
: 
: I may add, that Hans-Petter Selasky has a MPSAFE replacement (written from
: scratch it seems) for I4B (AFAIK including capi) and the USB stack. I have
: tested or reviewed neither of them, but as far as I can read in the
: mailinglists, he adresses not only the issues you mention here, but he also
: provides bugfixes and additional features compared to our current code base.

The problem is that this code isn't busdma safe at the moment.  It was
posted for review on the NetBSD lists and this was the biggest set of
comments on tech-kern at netbsd.org.  Since it isn't busdma safe, we'd
lose usb on sparc64 (and maybe arm) when this code is brought into the
tree.  There have also been signficant concerns about the locking
that's done in the code as well, but I've not reviewed it recently.

There's been a lot of work done here, and that work is generally good,
but last time I looked at the code it wasn't ready to be integrated to
the tree.

Warner