FCP-0101: Deprecating most 10/100 Ethernet drivers

[Cy Schubert]

Not that I'm arguing to keep ed(4), I have three ne2000 PCI cards in my desk here. Sure one could insert one in a current machine, but why?

---
Sent using a tiny phone keyboard.
Apologies for any typos and autocorrect.
Also, this old phone only supports top post. Apologies.

Cy Schubert
<Cy.Schubert at cschubert.com> or <cy at freebsd.org>
The need of the many outweighs the greed of the few.
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-----Original Message-----
From: Warner Losh
Sent: 04/10/2018 07:45
To: fuz at fuz.su
Cc: freebsd-arch at freebsd.org
Subject: Re: FCP-0101: Deprecating most 10/100 Ethernet drivers

Well, I'd wager its 100 cards that nobody is currently using (ed) has no
value. Even 1000 different cards or 10,000. The ed(4) driver likely
supported in excess of 1000 different cards because so many people made
ne-2000 compatible cards... in the early 1990s. However, since nobody has
ISA or PC Card (not CardBus) interfaces anymore (those machines topped out
around 32-64MB, which FreeBSD no longer works well on), the benefit to the
project is quite low. Even the 'newer' PC Card versions that were 10/100
couldn't get more than about 10-12Mbps due to ISA/PC Card bus speed
limitations. The PCI versions were never popular (I had to hunt a bunch for
them 10 years ago when I was finishing up my activities on the driver for
my vast PC Card collection to find an example to test), and even it had
trouble beyond 20Mbps because it wasn't DMA'd. The ED driver was a solid
driver last time I tried it, but when I can plug in dozens of 100Mbps or
1Gbps cards into the same CardBus slot and those cost < $10 now, there's
very little return on programmer time to keeping this one going.

However, having said all that, if we can document 5 real users of this card
on machines running FreeBSD 12, it will meet the criteria for remaining,
just like any other driver.... So far we've found 0, while we have found
many other users of other drivers.

Warner

On Thu, Oct 4, 2018 at 8:27 AM Robert Clausecker <fuz at fuz.su> wrote:

> I have a machine with FreeBSD 2.2.8 running with such an interface, but
> none with FreeBSD 12, so you do have a point here.  However, I am not
> sure if it's a good idea to kill this driver; it's good for over 100
> different cards according to the man page, so surely there are some
> users left.
>
> Yours,
> Robert Clausecker
>
> On Wed, Oct 03, 2018 at 05:45:18PM -0600, Warner Losh wrote:
> > On Wed, Oct 3, 2018 at 3:54 PM Robert Clausecker <fuz at fuz.su> wrote:
> >
> > > I request that ed(4)
> >
> >
> > How many FreeBSD 12.0 machines do you have running with this interface?
> >
> > QEMU does support this interface, but also supports the Intel E1000
> series
> > (em/igb), so it's not necessarily needed for QEMU.
> >
> > Warner
>
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