Penned by Ted Unangst on 20130326 8:09.14, we have: | On Tue, Mar 26, 2013 at 11:13, Mark Kettenis wrote: | >> Date: Tue, 26 Mar 2013 05:20:27 -0400 | >> From: Ted Unangst <t...@tedunangst.com> | >> | >> These isa devs are already disabled and not particularly popular among | >> our users. affected: tcic, sea, wds, eg, el | > | > The reason these devices are disabled is probably that their probe | > routines are destructive. So the fact that they are disabled doesn't | > necessarily mean that they don't work properly. | > | > I don't think maintaining these drivers is currently a huge burden on | > us. But decoupling them from the build will almost certainly lead to | > some degree of bitrot. | | Perfection is achieved when there's nothing left to take away. :) | | It's not so much that we spend time maintaining the source, but I do | spend time compiling it. And I have to download it (3 times!) every | time I install a new snapshot. Cumulatively, I've probably spent hours | of my life waiting for these drivers' bits to go from here to there. I | will selfishly claim that if I save five minutes of time this year by | not compiling these files, that right there is more benefit than | retaining support. | | I targeted disabled devices figuring they were least likely to be | missed, but I honestly question the utility of any of these ISA | network and SCSI drivers. They're going to be slow as shit. Besides, | at this point, due to adding so many new drivers (kernel size has | more than doubled in last ten years) the minimum RAM requirement is | basically past ISA only machines. The segment of machines that lack | PCI but support 32M or more of RAM is very narrow. And unlike sparc or | vax, I don't think running OpenBSD on some ancient 486 is historically | interesting.
I have some of these devices actually. Haven't used them in a few years, mainly due to office moves and boxes of unpacked unsorted stuff. I do clearly recall that it is useful to only enable some isa devices if one has them. I guess the question is, are we moving to a world where isa is not supported and/or supportable? Sure, if I'm doing build tests I'm going to load a box with mem and the fastest disks and nics I have. If I'm testing hardware support and such, I'm going to want to get thorough coverage of the drivers we build and purport to support. I'd wager a bet that I could make my sea(4) scsi adapter work more reliably than any variant of usb wi(4), so perhaps we should disable usb wi(4) to save you time building instead? Thanks, -- Todd Fries .. t...@fries.net ____________________________________________ | \ 1.636.410.0632 (voice) | Free Daemon Consulting, LLC \ 1.405.227.9094 (voice) | http://FreeDaemonConsulting.com \ 1.866.792.3418 (FAX) | PO Box 16169, Oklahoma City, OK 73113 \ sip:freedae...@ekiga.net | "..in support of free software solutions." \ sip:4052279...@ekiga.net \\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\ 37E7 D3EB 74D0 8D66 A68D B866 0326 204E 3F42 004A http://todd.fries.net/pgp.txt
