FreeBSD Moves Ahead With Deprecating Some Of Their 10/100 Network Drivers

[phuclv]

I don't know what boards you're looking at phuclv, but they're certainly not modern. Mass market x86 boards have none of those ports, and haven't for years. Enthusiast boards sometimes still have at least one PS/2 port, server boards commonly have a serial port as well. I haven't seen a parallel port on any board since around 2005..

You can, however, find a PCMCIA slot on a 15 year old laptop. The Thinkpad X61 (2007) is the last X series Thinkpad to have a Cardbus type 2 slot, which will also accept PCMCIA cards. For desktop (non industrial) boards you'd struggle, some Socket A boards may still have been sold in 2003..

The majority of ATX mainboards nowadays still have PS/2 port. And 2 years ago it was still everywhere. It's certainly a lot easier to find a board with PS/2 support than PCMCIA. Same to finding a PS/2 device vs PCMCIA card. No one will complain if there's no driver for PCMCIA

Serial and parallel ports may disappear gradually on many newer consumer mainboards but on other segments they're still there, at least the serial port, because it's extremely easy to program with and still being used extensively by electronics engineers. Some examples:

- https://www.msi.com/Motherboard/H310M-PRO-VL.html
- https://www.asus.com/us/Commercial-S...ons/P10S-V-4L/
- https://www.asus.com/us/Commercial-S...ations/P10S-X/
- https://www.gigabyte.com/Motherboard...-DS2-rev-10#sp
- https://www.gigabyte.com/Motherboard...-DS2-rev-10#sp

All the workstations my company bought in the last 2 years still have the serial port and they're definitely not old. Removing support for those ports would result in catastrophe

[thunderbird32]

I'm not surprised they're dropping support for these cards, but it has to be said, some of these cards are almost the "platonic ideal" of network cards. The DEC Tulip, 3Com Etherlink, and NE-2000 were all super common cards, and have been supported by everything. Back in the day you could buy any of these cards and know that ANY OS you threw at them would have support. Early Linux, Windows, OS/2, OpenServer, BeOS, pretty much everything. In a way, it's sad to see them go. Ah well, we'll always have NetBSD.

[ynari]

I don't know what boards you're looking at phuclv, but they're certainly not modern. Mass market x86 boards have none of those ports, and haven't for years. Enthusiast boards sometimes still have at least one PS/2 port, server boards commonly have a serial port as well. I haven't seen a parallel port on any board since around 2005..

You can, however, find a PCMCIA slot on a 15 year old laptop. The Thinkpad X61 (2007) is the last X series Thinkpad to have a Cardbus type 2 slot, which will also accept PCMCIA cards. For desktop (non industrial) boards you'd struggle, some Socket A boards may still have been sold in 2003..

[phuclv]

That is a bit odd and short sighted if you ask me. It is sort of like RS232 support, most people don’t have a need anymore but when you do you really need the port.

the thing is that ports like LPT, RS232 and PS/2 are still there on pretty much every mainboard nowadays. However you can hardly find a PCMCIA or ISA slot on a 15-year-old laptop or desktop

[starshipeleven]

How do you know? Do FreeBSD users have to register with the website?

It's ancient crap.

[Space Heater]

The removal of drivers can be understandable in some cases but if support is still there they need to stay in the kernel. If you work in industries where hardware is expected to work for years, even decades, it is extremely frustrating to see common network drivers being pulled.

I mentioned RS232 because it is similarly needed for long term support. In fact in industrial settings I don’t see RS232 and related serial interfaces ever going away 100%. People always say “upgrade” but that is never easy and may require stringent validations to be done. A validation can blow out the cost of a computer replacement by 10 or even a 100 times.

In any event it is decisions like this that means FeeBSD can never be suggested as a solution where long term support is expected. Dropping Ethernet support just isn’t rational considering how wide spread it is. It might make sense in a constantly updated data center but out in the larger world it just looks like a dick move.

They are marking them as deprecated, this isn't a surprise removal at all. Did you read the mailing list? If they find out that they are still in use before FreeBSD 13 (which is likely to be in the 2020s) they will not remove them. You are truly in the realm of hyperbole when removing 20 year old ISA-era ethernet drivers is equivalent to abandoning all but "constantly updated data centers".

[wizard69]

You should look over the list of drivers. Some of them I recognize as ISA era network cards. One of those was even for a DEC chip, and DEC hasn't even been in business for 20 years.
If you really want to run ancient hardware, you're probably going to have to just bite the bullet and run ancient software too.

I really don’t care about the list of drivers per say, what I care about is Ethernetin general and the apparent abandonment of the older standards. This isn’t Wangnet or some other failed solution it is rather the most widely used form of networking.

As for running ancient hardware sadly sadly I know exactly what that is like. I still have DOS based machines running a few interferometers because there are no upgrade paths that make sense. And yes part of the issue is ISA cards that no replacements exist for.

Im of the opinion that some drivers will need to be maintained for decades or longer if FreeBSD expects traction outside of the data center. Some interfaces will seemingly never die.

[wizard69]

How is it odd or short-sighted? These drivers were not in use and they are an active maintenance burden on the network stack. Linux removes drivers as well when no one uses them, so this isn't at all unique to FreeBSD.

The removal of drivers can be understandable in some cases but if support is still there they need to stay in the kernel. If you work in industries where hardware is expected to work for years, even decades, it is extremely frustrating to see common network drivers being pulled.

I mentioned RS232 because it is similarly needed for long term support. In fact in industrial settings I don’t see RS232 and related serial interfaces ever going away 100%. People always say “upgrade” but that is never easy and may require stringent validations to be done. A validation can blow out the cost of a computer replacement by 10 or even a 100 times.

In any event it is decisions like this that means FeeBSD can never be suggested as a solution where long term support is expected. Dropping Ethernet support just isn’t rational considering how wide spread it is. It might make sense in a constantly updated data center but out in the larger world it just looks like a dick move.

[jabl]

You should look over the list of drivers. Some of them I recognize as ISA era network cards. One of those was even for a DEC chip, and DEC hasn't even been in business for 20 years.
If you really want to run ancient hardware, you're probably going to have to just bite the bullet and run ancient software too.

There were lots of cheap tulip clone cards from a variety of manufacturers long after DEC ceased to exist. I had one made by, IIRC, Linksys.

IIRC back in the day it had, among Intel and 3com, the best Linux driver.

[mzs.112000]

I have one of the DEC Tulip based cards. But in truth, I haven't used it in roughly a decade. Let alone for FreeBSD.

This change means they will lose support in, what, 2021? If anyone cares at that point they can build their own kernel, or pay for that - or to maintain it, which seemingly isn't happening right now; which is its own issue for anyone relying on it now.

I found several gigabit ethernet cards on Amazon, some are as low priced as $9.99(US)... If it gets to the point where a company now has to pay someone else to maintain a driver and/or a fork of the OS itself, it would just be cheaper to buy some new hardware. Sure, the server might be so old that it only has an ISA slot, well in that case, I can find bunches of old Dell PowerEdge servers on eBay for as low as $250(US). Sure these servers are old by 2018 standards, but still new enough to support modern hardware, and will be at least 5 times faster than anything that still uses ISA-based ethernet as it's primary network connection...
In any case, by the time someone needs to pay someone to maintain ancient software/drivers, it usually ends up being cheaper to just replace the hardware, with something less ancient...