Linux Looks Toward Dropping Very Old WiFi Drivers

[User42]

I do miss the old PCMCIA slots and cards. Today, everything is attached to a fragile USB port (A/C-Whatever), or it's attached to the same port but with a cable, making it like a donkey tail.

The nostalgia is mighty (had that same netgear card)... But I agree... I would love to see a standard USB (or PCI-something) port that is made for sturdy and permanent external plugging... No need to open your computer to add a proper wifi card, a secured SSD, a HDMI port or whatever... Imagine carrying your home directory around on something that won't get corrupted at the slightest touch...

[schmidtbag]

I do miss the old PCMCIA slots and cards. Today, everything is attached to a fragile USB port (A/C-Whatever), or it's attached to the same port but with a cable, making it like a donkey tail.

There's ExpressCard, which unfortunately died out. Though, nowadays there isn't a whole lot you would need such devices for. I don't even find myself using a whole lot of USB devices anymore.

[CommunityMember]

What about a new 'unstaging' area where things being retired go?

Someone (actually, a few someones) would need to step up to maintain such an area and take over maintenance (including porting of those drivers when the needed core APIs are disappeared). The issue is precisely that no one is porting these older device drivers (as they are abandoned/orphaned). Can you and your employer commit to the needed resources now and into the foreseeable future? If so, there is no reason to remove then in the first place.

[r1348]

i used to have some weird 802.11b dongle from Texas Instrument, I wonder where it went...
It even had a (barely working) kernel driver.

[Mangix]

I'm still using Broadcom BCM4312. I hope they don't remove drivers for it.
I hope they are talking about b43legacy, not b43 driver.

Both are modern and still maintained drivers.

[billyswong]

The nostalgia is mighty (had that same netgear card)... But I agree... I would love to see a standard USB (or PCI-something) port that is made for sturdy and permanent external plugging... No need to open your computer to add a proper wifi card, a secured SSD, a HDMI port or whatever... Imagine carrying your home directory around on something that won't get corrupted at the slightest touch...

The closest modern reincarnation of that that I can think of is what Framework laptops invented, a fixed size slot with USB-C connection.

https://frame.work/marketplace/expansion-cards

[mifritscher]

I actually still use the depicted Netgear Card on an bit older notebook.
PCMCIA and ExpressCard were great - Cardreader, eSATA, WWAN/WLAN, TV decoder - and most cards fitted completely in the notebook, so they could stay while traveling. A pity that the ExpressCard group was disbanded 2013(?) to the USB(!) group, which had no interest. Nowadays you have only the USB dongles which can be broken very easily. In many laptops of today, you can not even stick in a (micro) SD card and leave it in as everyday storage, or a mouse dongle... In my opinion, there should be at least a new standard where you can stick in e.g. 4x3 cm modules completely in the laptop, with a standard USB-c connector. The modules in the framwork laptops go in this direction.

[stormcrow]

I am a little hesitant on something like this. Linux has long been known for its very good hardware compatibility, especially on older hardware.

I wonder if making these an optional module would be a better option than getting rid of them altogether.

They're already optional. That's the definition of a "module". Someone still has to maintain them. To properly maintain them they need the hardware to do so. The older these legacy systems get, the harder it is to keep them functional. Capacitors have a lifetime even if they're solid rather than liquid electrolyte.

I do think this is the very reason there needs to be a set of stable driver APIs in the kernel to allow for the ability to maintain a different pace of driver development independent of the core kernel itself. Just because it's "stable" doesn't mean it's set in stone, like a lot of people seem to believe. It just doesn't change unless there's a real reason to do so beyond someone's whim.

[ids1024]

There's ExpressCard, which unfortunately died out. Though, nowadays there isn't a whole lot you would need such devices for. I don't even find myself using a whole lot of USB devices anymore.

There are plenty of things it could be useful for, but a lot are a bit niche. And you can get use a USB device, with the aforementioned downsides.

Could be useful for an SD reader (or other type of card reader) if you use that a lot for getting data off something like a camera and your laptop doesn't have one already. Or for a sound card if your computer doesn't have headphone/microphone jacks or doesn't have particularly good ones. But maybe those are easier to just include by default. For some uses a capture card could be handy, and having a PCIe based card in a slot may be better than dealing with a USB device. Could be useful for Ethernet, but I guess if guess the dongle doesn't make that much worse...

For some of these sorts of things things, at least the ones needing high speeds, PCIe cards can be cheaper than external options. And just end up being more reliable. And mechanically secure relative to something hanging off a port. So if a modern version of ExpressCard was standard on laptop, I'd probably choose it over USB for certain things.

[RussianNeuroMancer]

Wireless RNDIS USB driver used for some 802.11b/802.11g hardware from 2004 to 2006 but isn't maintained and already marked as legacy

This doesn't include RNDIS support for Android, right?