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

[iustinp]

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.

Ah, this scenario I didn't think of. I wanted to reply to your first paragraph, for industrial systems, I'd expect they can stay on older versions since they should be isolated anyway. But fair point, there might be quite a few such uses.

[Rallos Zek]

NetBSD will happily run on a VAX 11/780.

Will it? According to OpenBSD fans since NetBSD ports are cross-compiles for different archs and not native, most of the NetBSD ports to archs are broken in some way. OpenBSD has a policy of native builds for supported archs.

[Developer12]

Will it? According to OpenBSD fans since NetBSD ports are cross-compiles for different archs and not native, most of the NetBSD ports to archs are broken in some way. OpenBSD has a policy of native builds for supported archs.

Yes, it actually will. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MjzX9Sk5Ax0

There are people in the NetBSD project who consider the VAX port specifically to be the canary in the coal mine for unexpected performance regressions.

https://youtu.be/e7cJ7v2lYdE?t=2224

[stormcrow]

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.

What a lot of people don't realize (and while this comment isn't untrue, I doubt FreeBSD specifically has to worry about this issue) is that there are some relatively recent motherboards that still have/had their RTC (real time clock/time counter) hanging off an ISA bus even on AMD64 class systems. Specifically when they started tagging ISA as deprecated they discovered this problem: atrtc(4) driver is a mandatory part of the FreeBSD kernel and it requires the ISA infrastructure. To move forward they have to untangle atrtc from the ISA code then give sufficient time to figure out if any current FreeBSD users have an RTC timer still hanging on a physical or virtual ISA bus. Yes ISA is ancient, blah blah blah. It's still sufficient bandwidth to easily handle a system's legacy RTC clock which only operates in the kHz range.

[grahamperrin]

GIANT

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

I'm not a developer, not qualified to answer. This 2022 comment was memorable:

https://forums.freebsd.org/posts/560837

HTH

[cmsigler]

NetBSD will happily run on a VAX 11/780.

Could you wait a couple of weeks, please, while I add a utility room to the back of my house? And get the necessary utilities hooked up to it?...