Hi Andreas, On Wed, Aug 20, 2014 at 04:46:38AM +0200, Andreas Mohr wrote:
> Hi, > > > Gameport support hasn't been working well ever since cpufreq became > > mainstream and it becomes increasingly hard to find hardware and > > software > > that would run on such old hardware. > > Given that I'm puzzled why one would want to deprecate a whole subsystem > which appears to be supported by a whole 14 different PCI sound card > drivers (where the ones I'm owning hardware of are intended to be in > active maintenance) Are you actively testing gameport interfaces with real joysticks/gamepads on these cards? And what software is still in use that runs on these old boxes (with mainline kernel)? > and only 3 ISA-based ones, I'm missing several > details and justifications of that decision here (perhaps there was a > prior discussion/activity that I'm missing?). There was a post to linux-input a few days ago when I ased if anyone woudl cry over gameport going away. > > Also, I'm left wondering why e.g. my Athlon XP system (a very popular > choice for longer times) would be affected by Cpufreq... > And there are no details on how exactly cpufreq is a problem or how this > timing issue could be fixed... If you take a look at gameport_measure_speed() in gameport.c you will see that it counts cycles for timing, which obviously does not work that well when CPU frequency changes. The bugs have been opened in bugzilla/reported on lists ages ago but nobody stepped up to fix that. > The obvious workaround for such an ensuing dearth of hardware support > could be USB 15-pin gameport adapters - but are they even supported on > Linux? Haven't seen info on this... > And even if supported, these adapters (at least the non-perfect ones, as > can be seen from reviews on a well-known online shop site) are said to > be hit-or-miss. > > http://www.flightsim.com/vbfs/showthread.php?238938-joystick-GamePort-to-USB-adapter-question > http://reviews.thesource.ca/9026/2600164/nexxtech-usb-gameport-adapter-reviews/reviews.htm > They have better chance of being supported ;) I had a couple a few years back and they did work for me. > If we keep removing functionality like this, then why stop short of > removing x86 32bit as a whole? By having Linux support nicely restricted > to hardware made within the last 5 years, we would surely be doing the > planned-obsolescence Micro$oft "ecosystem" (what was ecological about > this again?) a huge favour... I really do not care about Microsoft and favors, I just go by the fact that this hardware is becoming naturally extinct. And not only hardware, but also software that uses it. Do you still play a lot of games with joysticks on such hardware? Thanks. -- Dmitry -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majord...@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
