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...

[John Baldwin]

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).

-- 
John Baldwin