Time to retire PC Card (but not CardBus)

[Rodney W. Grimes]

I must ask that you first retire the lack of a formal
deprecation policy and document, you promised this to
us over a year ago.  I made a gentlemans barter with you
on no resistance to lua being merged and on by default
in 12, you have failed to hold your end of the barter up.

We have now done several deprecation cycles and no document
or policy is in place.

Thankfully a great deal was learned through FCP 101, but
there is always more to learn.


> Greetings,
> 
> Now that a number of 16-bit drivers have been retired, I think it's time to
> retire 16-bit PC Card / PCMCIA cards. The 32-bit CardBus cards are still
> alive and kicking, but the need for 16-bit PC Cards has passed. It's time
> to retire it.
> 
> I've floated this idea before, and there was broad support for it. I've
> held off until after FCP 101 deprecation was playing out. We've not pushed
> that into the tree. This is the logical next step. FreeBSD 12.x will be the
> last release with 16-bit PC Card support.
> 
> My plan is to add deprecation notices to the remaining PC Card drivers,
> merge those back to FreeBSD 11 and 12. Once that's done, I plan on removing
> the 16-bit support. I have a few minor bug fixes to that which I'll push in
> before I retire it, and merge those fixes.
> 
> My plan is to give about a month for the community to discuss this plan
> before I add the warnings. If there's resistance, we'll go with more formal
> data collection and deprecation. If there's none, I'll go ahead.
> 
> This affects the following drivers: an, cmx, fdc, puc, uart, wi, bt3c, ata.

fdc, puc, uart, ata?   Huh?
Or are there PCMCIA stubs in these that need to die?

iirc, the an come in a PCI adapter card with a PLX asic on them
to bridge them into what kinda looks like a PCI card, would this
kill that suppor too?

-- 
Rod Grimes                                                 rgrimes at freebsd.org