FCP-0101: Deprecating most 10/100 Ethernet drivers

[Warner Losh]

On Thu, Oct 4, 2018 at 6:53 AM Luciano Mannucci <luciano at vespaperitivo.it>
wrote:

> On Thu, 4 Oct 2018 13:03:01 +0700
> Eugene Grosbein <eugen at grosbein.net> wrote:
> > > The current list of drivers that will STAY in the tree is:
> > >
> > > dc, ffec, fxpl, hme, le, sis, vr, xl
> >
> > "fxpl" should have been "fxp" here, I suppose.
>

Yes.


> > While I have no objection for general direction, I have doubts about
> removal
> > of ste(4) and especially rl(4). These are cheap 100Mbit VERY popular NICs
> > sold in enourmous values in certain markets by vendors like D-Link and
> > TP-Link using various trade names.
>

Enough people are using rl that it's off the list by my count.


> > Lack of support for such popular 100M cards won't be good for FreeBSD, I
> > suppose.
>
> I have a lot of them in production systems. It would be a pity that they
> will never get a 12.x or newer version ever. I can replace few de cards
> but not everything...
>

To be clear, the proposal is that 12.x be the last branch they are
supported in and not in 13. So while we'd remove them from current soon,
they'd still be in 12 for the life of the 12.x branch, so into the early
2020's.

Warner