I'd like to axe some drivers

[Warner Losh]

On Nov 21, 2014, at 8:55 AM, John Baldwin <jhb at FreeBSD.org> wrote:

> On Thursday, November 20, 2014 02:07:52 PM John-Mark Gurney wrote:
>> I'm fine w/ removing these...  Should we do some house cleaning on
>> amd64's GENERIC too?
> 
> I'd rather not diverge this thread too much.
> 
>> amd64's GENERIC has a lot of ISA or 100Mbit ethernet cards that are
>> clearly not going to be used on these machines...
> 
> I think ISA might make sense.  I think 100Mbit PCI ethernet is not as
> obvious.  One of my previous desktops (an Athlon64 machine) had pcn as
> its on-board Ethernet.
> 
>> My recommended list to remove:
>> ae, bfe, dc, fxp, hme?, pcn, rl, tx, vr, wb, xl, cs, ed, ex, ep, fe,
>> sn, xe
>> 
>> All of these are modules, so if someone really needs them, they can
>> load the module...
> 
> One thing that might help is that if pccard grows the same ability as
> USB to auto-load modules on insert (I feel like pccardd did this in
> 4.x, so this might still work via devd now?), we could remove most of
> the ISA drivers from GENERIC on both i386 and amd64 that are nowadays
> only going to be used for pccard (that's pretty much all the ISA NICs
> aside from ie(4)).  (And pccard things still work in CardBus slots, so
> are still possibly relevant for 64-bit laptops with CardBus.)

USB doesn’t have the ability to autoload, and never has.

Huge, ugly tables of all USB devices are generated and fed into devd 
as NOMATCH rules to give the illusion that it supports autoload. It is really
evil.

pccardd never did do autoload, unless you hacked the default matching
stuff to include module loading.

PC Card devices could do a similar set of evil, since almost almost all the
PC Card drivers use a centralized table routine. It could almost be an ELF
section of the .ko that could be parsed by a generic NOMATCH program.
But failing that, an ugly dirty script could be written to grep the data out of
the source and produce evil nasty Bagginses, errr, NOMATCH scripts.

Forget about it for CardBus cards, because PCI never did do anything this
nicely and there’s a wide variety of ways to match the card extant in the
tree.

Warner
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