After A Delay, ISA Drivers Will Be Kept Around Until FreeBSD 15

[phoronix]

Phoronix: After A Delay, ISA Drivers Will Be Kept Around Until FreeBSD 15

FreeBSD 14.0-RC4 was issued today and as a last minute change they have decided to keep (non-PNP) ISA and GIANT-locked drivers around until FreeBSD 15...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/FreeBSD-Keeps-ISA-Drivers

[kylew77]

Seems like a logical move. With FreeBSD dropping support for i686 hardware in 15.0 it would make sense to get rid of old drivers then. Thanks as always for the BSD news Michael, second to none!

[iustinp]

ISA? ISA?!! Oh my, this is call from the dark ages.

I think any real i686 with actual ISA ports is slower than a RPI4, not even 5, nowadays. Just move on…

[varikonniemi]

In the previous thread about Linux removing old device support some bsd fan criticized Linux pointing to how bsd maintains support for very old hardware. Where is your god now?

[grahamperrin]

Maybe not a last minute decision.

reduce the GIANT hacks was wanted, in a 15.0 context, around six months ago:

https://github.com/bsdjhb/devsummit/blob/main/15.0/planning.md

PS Michael, I'm always grateful for coverage. I hope that you're never offended by clarifications or corrections; feel free to kick back. Thanks.

[grahamperrin]

In the previous thread about Linux removing old device support some bsd fan criticized Linux pointing to how bsd maintains support for very old hardware. Where is your god now?

I don't know about yours, but my god is checking his iPad trying to find a link for the nebulous previous thread.

[iustinp]

Maybe not a last minute decision.

reduce the GIANT hacks was wanted, in a 15.0 context, around six months ago:

https://github.com/bsdjhb/devsummit/blob/main/15.0/planning.md

Quick question since you seem to have context: why is this still being kept in? Are there worries about real devices still needing this?

[kpedersen]

In the previous thread about Linux removing old device support some bsd fan criticized Linux pointing to how bsd maintains support for very old hardware. Where is your god now?

My god is still chugging along nicely. Plus there is a big difference between ISA hardware and stuff that is relatively new. Linux broke ISA support too early in my opinion.

I know this is RHEL/Fedora specific but some of the "deprecated" drivers in this list was far too premature around RHEL 7 era.

https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterprise_linux/7/html/7.7_release_notes/deprecated_functionality#deprecated_device_drivers

The key ones are iwl4965 and iwl3945.

Even now with Oracle Linux 9.2, after a (UEK) kernel update the wifi on my fairly recent ThinkPad X220i have been stripped. Its like a dumb treadmill.

[Developer12]

In the previous thread about Linux removing old device support some bsd fan criticized Linux pointing to how bsd maintains support for very old hardware. Where is your god now?

NetBSD will happily run on a VAX 11/780.

[Developer12]

ISA? ISA?!! Oh my, this is call from the dark ages.

I think any real i686 with actual ISA ports is slower than a RPI4, not even 5, nowadays. Just move on…

People frequently need to use old ISA cards in industrial environments. Assuming they have the source code for the driver, it can be much cheaper for pay $10,000 a software engineer to port it to each new version of linux or BSD than to replace a $500,000 or $1,000,000 peice of heavy equipment.

Meanwhile, continuing to move to new OSs helps keep it all talking with their IT. It may be talking over a 10BaseT ethernet card, but it needs to talk to the latest version of samba to download CNC toolpaths from the engineers' dell workstations.