To be retired soon...

[Warner Losh]

About 18 months ago, there was a thread that talked about retiring older
storage devices and some ISA devices that have outlived their usefulness.

Here's the list that John Baldwin posted.

- Older storage adapters:
  - aha (ISA)
  - adv (ISA / PCI)
  - adw (PCI)?
  - bt (ISA /  PCI)
  - aic (ISA / PCCard)
  - dpt (ISA / PCI)
  - ncv (PCCard / PCI)
  - nsp (PCCard)
  - stg (ISA / PCCard / PCI)
- mse(4) (ISA-only non-PS-2, non-serial mouse)
- joy(4) (ISA-only, was on various Sound Cards, etc., but I haven't seen
  a "game port" on a modern box in a long while)

I plan on marking these drivers with a new API (
https://reviews.freebsd.org/D13818) in the coming days saying they will be
removed in 12.x (meaning not in 12.0 or later). Man pages will be updated
as well. I then plan to  MFC all this code to 11 shortly after. Current
users will start to receive warnings. I get that we should have done this
sooner given our loosely observed deprecation practices in the past, but
we're doing it now (which beats how we've done this in the past, which is
why I'm adding the gone_in() to allow things we plan on retiring in 13
before 12-stable is branched). In about a month (sometime after Feb 15th),
I plan on removing these from FreeBSD, absent any actual users reporting
that recent FreeBSD 12 systems work. There are a number of special cases in
CAM that be removed once these are gone, as well as code that's only used
by these drivers.

I've spoken to Scott Long about these drivers, and he's 100% on-board with
retiring them. As far as he knows, the only parallel SCSI driver that works
is mpt with LSI 2x320 cards, so these cards are (a) too slow to even be
remotely relevant (b) have all kinds of problems that haven't been resolved
in 5-ish years of reports of malfunction. mse/joy are also at least 15
years past their even marginal relevance.

Comments?

Warner