I'd like to axe some drivers

[Adrian Chadd]

On 20 November 2014 14:30, Warner Losh <imp at bsdimp.com> wrote:
> 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.

I found an ISA ie(4) NIC on Ebay. Who has a box with ISA ports? :)



-adrian