FreeBSD Is Looking To Drop Many Of Its 10/100 Ethernet Drivers

[Jabberwocky]

I would say ditching 100Mbps would be a mistake. In particular, a lot of USB ethernet devices are still based on 100Mbps. Those are pretty handy as a backup/failsafe, or for systems that may not have ethernet.

+1 I am advocating for 10Gbps in mainstream, but I can still see many uses for old 100Mbps chips.

My homelab currently has both a x86 based 10Gbps router and a raspberry pi 1 model b router with two 100MbE interfaces running pfsense and openwrt respectively. pfsense crashed when updating to 2.4.4 last month, it's funny that the raspberry pi is more stable so far. I obviously don't blame freebsd for pfsense's problems, used freebsd in production for many years and was a breeze to maintain, as long as you are not using java.

[dwagner]

There is still contemporary hardware being sold that, by default, uses 100base-T modes on interfaces seeing only little traffic (like certain IP phones etc.), for the simple purpose of consuming not more power than necessary. As long as 1G-baseT consumes substantially more power, I think there is reason to retain support for 100baseT drivers.

[aht0]

Typos:
The driver names are cryptic...

NIC's designation is pretty much name of the kernel module for particular hardware plus ascending integer counter, starting with a zero. Latter's order is defined by NIC's MAC. Yeah, much shorter than what Linux has ever had. Querying man pages should "decrypt" meanings for all the names in question.
For example: rl's Linux's equivalent is rtl8139 (https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?...lt&format=html)

You really want to still use this junk-NIC? Don't. fxp is much better (Intel EtherExpress PRO/100) if you really like ancient cards. And it's driver is going to be kept.

[rhavenn]

Supporting them through FreeBSD 12 means they'll be around through at least 2023. They won't actually be removed until FreeBSD 13. A 5-year heads up seems like it's plenty. I don't think I've bought a motherboard or device, including some 5-port devices for firewall service, that weren't capable of 1Gb in over 10 years. Are there edge-cases? Yeap. Those edge-cases are also free to step up and volunteer some money or time to do driver maintenance.

Also, USB devices are not slated for removal.

[cb88]

The obvious thing is they should quit breaking the kernel interface and leave them be, and create a second Ethernet subsystem that is optimal for 10gb+

Claiming maintenance burden is is a cop out to excuse deleting otherwise working code....

[cb88]

It is also worth noting Haiku uses thier 10/100 drivers and they'll likely love on there regardless of what freebsd does.

[brrrrttttt]

While that observation may be accurate, how many of those embedded devices can utilize the full Gigabit Ethernet bandwidth? Go ahead, do the research, I'll wait.

A lot of embedded devices do not make full use of Gigabit Ethernet speeds. Even USB-attached (USB3) Gigabit Ethernet devices get less than 500 megabits per second of speed in the real world, not those almost impossible and unrealistic lab tests that are used to advertise fantastic speeds.

That's entirely irrelevant to a discussion about maintaining drivers for 100 Mb/s NIC drivers. Nobody said gigabit drivers should be dropped because the system is unable to fully utilise them.

I don't know enough about FreeBSD to comment with any accuracy as to it's internal issues, but everything I read suggests the following:

• FreeBSD internals are not sufficiently modular or contain adequate intermediate layers to permit major code changes without causing major breakage/rewrites elsewhere across the codebase.

Linux is very much in this boat too, by design. Internal kernel APIs need to be fluid enough to allow the kernel to progress into the future.

• The author/maintainer of the driver is getting bored doing their work and/or simply does not see the value in these drivers that other see.

No issues with this at all. If somebody else wants to maintain them, let them step up.

• FreeBSD might have a maintainer staff issue, like not enough of them that want/need to do the proper and required work to maintain their portion of the overall product.

FreeBSD claims they are eliminating no longer used or non-working drivers. I agree with eliminating "non-working" drivers, but only after an investigation as to what efforts were made to correct those issues. Did the maintainer simply give up? Did vendor support disappear? What's the reason Kenneth?

Then there is the question of "no longer used " drivers. How was that conclusion arrived at? What data does FreeBSD have to back up it's claims? Perhaps those drivers simply work, have bugs that rarely impact anyone, and users simply use them without complaining about them. If that's the case then why not simply freeze the development of that driver and keep it in the library?

He is free to do as little or as much as he likes. It's up to those who depend on the drivers to step up and do their share if they wish the drivers to remain.

[boltronics]

There was a time around 10 years back where I was serious about trying to get into FreeBSD. I've always used GNU/Linux everywhere and never felt there are any significant advantages to FreeBSD (but a great many disadvantages). Anyway, I was trying to install and configure a test server, and I was having issues getting the network card working. I thought this strange as it had been many years (even at the time) since I had had an incompatibility issue with a network card on GNU/Linux.

Luckily I had nearly 10 spare (mostly PCI) networking cards I had accumulated over the years. I painstakingly tried each of them and didn't get anywhere. Eventually I found the network hardware compatibility list from the FreeBSD documentation, and sure enough none of the cards were supported.

I then took a printout of the list to a hardware store with the intent of getting anything documented as being compatible. That was a huge pain since the store wouldn't open the box to allow me to check the chipset. Fortunately they had a return policy so I could purchase one, walk out of the store, open it and check, and then go back in to the store and get a refund and repeat until I found a compatible card (if there even was one). I took an educated guess and luckily I got a card on the list on my first attempt that wasn't too expensive.

So I got it home, installed it, and... nope, still didn't work. While the hardware was "supported", there was a known regression and the card wouldn't work with any recent release! So seeing this news where FreeBSD wants to prune their networking hardware support back even further... while it might sound mean, I can only laugh.

[rockworldmi]

boltronics I would suggest trying OpenBSD too ..it's easy and very straightforward and sane defaults

[Kazuo-Omura]

The main thing reading the list of drivers to take away:

This article is clickbaity. They're removing old drivers no longer up to their code standards, so they say. This is mostly 10/100mbit drivers, but not all of them. It's kind of... making some sense I guess? But I don't particularly care for removing things unless they're marked broken and the maintainer says "nope, not gonna fix" or it has been superseded by a better implementation.

It is overall frustrating to see. DragonFlyBSD has no POWER support. FreeBSD's POWER support is bad. NetBSD is primitive in so many areas (a fresh install on a Ryzen box had terminal/tty issues over SSH, like... what? You don't know xterm-256color or stty erase '^?') OpenBSD has an unprofessional lead and people who are hellbent on neutering it.

Solaris meanwhile has only Tribblix and OpenIndiana. FreeBSD, between the stupid Contributor Covenant BS, and these changes I dunno if it's gonna continue being smart to use. And to think two years ago they actually did right and kicked Randi Harper out.