svn commit: r312910 - in head: . etc/etc.pc98 etc/rc.d lib/libsysdecode libexec release release/doc release/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/hardware release/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/readme release/doc/share/example...

[Warner Losh]

On Tue, Jan 31, 2017 at 3:46 PM, John Baldwin <jhb at freebsd.org> wrote:
> On Tuesday, January 31, 2017 03:33:55 PM Warner Losh wrote:
>> On Tue, Jan 31, 2017 at 3:20 PM, John Baldwin <jhb at freebsd.org> wrote:
>> > On Saturday, January 28, 2017 02:22:15 AM Takahashi Yoshihiro wrote:
>> >> Author: nyan
>> >> Date: Sat Jan 28 02:22:15 2017
>> >> New Revision: 312910
>> >> URL: https://svnweb.freebsd.org/changeset/base/312910
>> >>
>> >> Log:
>> >>   Remove pc98 support completely.
>> >>   I thank all developers and contributors for pc98.
>> >>
>> >>   Relnotes:   yes
>> >
>> > BTW, my impression was that there are some other device drivers
>> > that are effectively PC-98 only (e.g. everything that uses scsi_low.c)
>> > but they might have pccard attachments for use with PC-98 laptops?
>> >
>> > Perhaps Warner might know?
>> >
>> > It seems stg(4) had PCI variants, but nsp(4), ncv(4), and stg(4)
>> > all came from NetBSD/pc98 via PAO.
>>
>> These all work correctly on any PC Card machine. The only reason they
>> came in this way was because these devices were original marketed only
>> in Japan. I've used all these cards with external SCSI drives in the
>> past.
>>
>> As far as I know, only the if_snc driver, which was removed, is truly
>> pc98 specific. It is wired in such a way that cannot be used in ibm-at
>> compatible laptops.  IIRC, it had hard-wired memory decode lines that
>> landed in the middle of the VGA graphics pages or BIOS low memory
>> areas. I have one of these cards still, and it will be detected on my
>> laptops, but can't work due to the required mappings.
>>
>> Now, there's an different question about whether it is time to retire
>> some of the now-ancient SCSI cards from the system, but that's a
>> different kettle of fish that's larger than just nsp, ncv and stg.
>
> Fair enough.  I haven't fully put away my 12 axe and am toying with
> dropping any ISA-only storage and NIC drivers (and perhaps pccard-only
> as well in that case).  Hardware that wants to use ISA/pccard for
> storage is probably happier running 4.x anyway.  One question is if we
> should drop ISA attachments in that case for drivers that support PCI
> and ISA.  However, there's a fair list of ISA-only adapters that would
> be a good place to start anyway.  One concern is to not drop any drivers
> that are commonly used in emulators or hypervisors (ed(4) comes to mind
> though I think em(4) is probably available in any modern emulators or
> hypervisors).

ISA-only attachments would be a good place to start. My quick glance
shows this would be le(4), aha(4), cm(4), mse(4), and joy(4). There's
maybe half a dozen EISA-only drivers in the tree that I was planning
on retiring in 12, along with EISA. Likewise with the MCA attachments.

I know that ed, ep, ex, sn, fe and cs PC Card attachments still work,
or did fairly recently. All of those also have ISA attachments. I have
no clue if the ISA attachments work, though I still have some ISA
systems, I got rid of all my SCSI and Network ISA cards some time ago.

I had hoped to get all the pnp autoloading code going so we could
remove them from GENERIC before the 11 branch, but keep them as
modules. I ran out of time. However, there's still time for 12 though.

Warner