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

[Ian Lepore]

On Thu, 2018-05-24 at 01:34 +0700, Eugene Grosbein wrote:
> 24.05.2018 1:14, Rodney W. Grimes wrote:
> 
> > 
> > > 
> > > On Wed, May 23, 2018 at 10:41:17AM -0700, Gleb Smirnoff wrote:
> > > > 
> > > > 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?
> > > Depends on how many existing users we want to screw over.  Not everyone
> > > replaces all their hardware every 2 years, folks.
> > And some of us buy 2 year old hardware because it is cheap,
> > and serves our needs just fine.   Even 8 year old servers
> > make usable machines today.
> My home router runs 11.1-STABLE/i386 using PC-104 form factor system from the year 2007
> having AMD Geode processor not capable of 64 bit mode, RAM maxed at 1GB (2x512MB DIMMs),
> UDMA100 IDE/PATA controller and two 100Mbit vr(4) vlan-capable network interfaces.
> 
> It can route/nat PPPoE connection at 100M wire speed, performs IPSEC at 33Mbit/s using
> cryptodev/onboard AES accelerator while acting as WiFi access point same time
> using multi-AP capable AR5212 ath(4) miniPCI (not miniPCI-E) card.
> 
> And I love FreeBSD for that.
> 
> 

At $work we still build and ship some products using industrial SBCs
similar to what you describe (32-bit Geode processor and vr(4) network
driver). That hardware is still available today (and not just on ebay).

I think there's a big difference between removing an old driver because
the hardware it supports was a marketplace failure and almost no units
exist in the wild, and removing old drivers just because they're old.

-- Ian