svn commit: r333388 - in head: . share/man/man4 sys/conf sys/dev/nxge sys/modules sys/modules/nxge tools/kerneldoc/subsys tools/tools tools/tools/nxge usr.sbin/bsdconfig/share

[Warner Losh]

On Wed, May 23, 2018 at 1:11 PM, Bjoern A. Zeeb <
bzeeb-lists at lists.zabbadoz.net> wrote:

> On 23 May 2018, at 18:20, Brooks Davis wrote:
>
> On Wed, May 23, 2018 at 10:41:17AM -0700, Gleb Smirnoff wrote:
>>
>>> On Tue, May 08, 2018 at 09:14:29PM +0000, Sean Bruno wrote:
>>> S> Log:
>>> S>   nxge(4):
>>> S>   Remove nxge(4) and associated man page and tools in FreeBSD 12.0.
>>> ...
>>> S> +20180508:
>>> S> +    The nxge(4) driver has been removed.  This driver was for PCI-X
>>> 10g
>>> S> +    cards made by s2io/Neterion.  The company was aquired by Exar and
>>> S> +    no longer sells or supports Ethernet products.  If you have
>>> device
>>> S> +    nxge in your kernel config file it must be removed.
>>> S> +
>>>
>>> If end of sales and support is enough to remove 10g driver from the
>>> kernel,
>>> can we please delete all 10Mbit, 100Mbit 10+ year old drivers from the
>>> kernel?
>>>
>>
>> It's probably a good idea to add deprecation notices for them now and
>> merge for 11 to find out which ones still have users.  Someone on IRC
>> mentioned that FreeNAS removed them and ended up restoring one, but I
>> don't remember which one it was.
>>
>> My gut feeling is that we're a bit late in the game for doing a mass
>> removal for 12, but we should definitely do so for 13.
>>
>
> I’d be very careful.  I can still buy a lot of 100Mbit/s cards and you
> constantly find them on new SoCs still which don’t do Gbit/s.  Also there’s
> a lot of legacy hw floating around for some of them.  12 definitively seems
> to be too short term.


There's a lot of really old drivers we could safely retire in 13 and not
affect more than a handful of users who could easily buy a new add-in card
since several of the early Bill Paul tulip drivers never were designed into
mobos.

There's no compelling reason to move quickly with 12 retirement. But
marking them *NOW* as going away in 13 will let us get some feedback from
people / situations that would be affected in plenty of time to change
course.

Warner