I'd like to axe some drivers

[Warner Losh]

tl;dr: kill everything on your list.

Notes.

On Nov 20, 2014, at 2:31 PM, John Baldwin <jhb at freebsd.org> wrote:

> wl(4):    This is a driver for an ancient pre-802.11 wireless adapter.  It
> 	      also includes wlconfig(8).  Warner promises he won't test any
>          patches for this.  It's older and slower than wi(4) and that driver
>          hasn't really worked in years.  (One could make the case for axing
>          an(4) and wi(4) as well, but I'm just pushing for wl(4).)

I had this driver working. In FreeBSD 4.2. I discontinued using this card
back in the 90’s. I discarded this cards themselves  a couple of years
ago. It doesn’t interoperate with anything except itself. Comparisons to
wi(4) aren’t really relevant.This is ancient hardware, of limited use to
all but a few arcane people that hasn’t likely be run in a real system
since before the US knew about Monica...

> ie(4):    Unfortunately, someone actually found one of these and tested it
>          several years ago when I added locking to it.  It is the only ISA
>          NIC driver that doesn't have a pccard attachment (you can in theory
>          still use a pccard NIC in a cardbus slot (though not ExpressCard)).
>          This also only does 10Mb using PIO (no DMA).  It doesn't use
>          bus_space.

No PC Cards using this chip were ever made that I could discover (and
I tried very hard). Not having enough users that care enough to update
it to the latest thing, nor to test it, etc speaks volumes. It’s hardware that’s
not relevant enough to generate in the 15 years that they’ve been around.
Other ISA and PC Card drivers have had those fixes done, but we’re not
talking about them. ie(4) should be retired.

Warner
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