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 3:20 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.

Warner