Time to retire PC Card (but not CardBus)

[Warner Losh]

On Thu, May 23, 2019 at 7:48 PM Rodney W. Grimes <
freebsd-rwg at gndrsh.dnsmgr.net> wrote:

> 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.
>

Sure. But please pick a week to ask me that I've not put an extra 50 hours
into the project putting out non-technical fires and am feeling behind...

I have a PC Card specific document that I can post that I wrote about the
same time as FCP 101.


> > 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?
>

Just the PC Card attachments to those devices. cmx and bt3c, however, will
be removed.


> 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?


wi and an both were like that.

an had isa and pci attachments. The isa version was for a PLX chip that
made the PCMCIA card just appear on the ISA bus. the driver did minimal
PCMCIA power-up in the attachment. There was a late minipci an card. It
didn't support anything newer 802.11b, and has no modern crypto (nothing
newer than WEP)

wi also had similar kludges. it too didn't support anything newer.

I'd be inclined to just kill both of these drivers, but am looking for
feedback from actual users.

Warner