Linux Looks Toward Dropping Very Old WiFi Drivers

[elbar]

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.

Problem is that finding someone interested in low level C shit to work with for such devices when there is a lot of Python libs or something to work with(and maybe wishing for F# or even level up )... Why bother with C kernel innovation from 1970-1980 eras...

[ayumu]

Long story short, look for some of the old 802.11b era and older PCMCIA-style wireless drivers to be likely on the chopping block soon given that they are unmaintained, use old interfaces, no apparent users, and do have a maintenance burden for the ongoing Linux kernel development.

No doubt caused by lack of driver APIs.

And even if some drivers are removed, this doesn't solve the fundamental problem which is lack of driver APIs: There's thousands upon thousands of drivers that still need to be maintained.

Imagine what could be done with those developer hours, in a good microkernel, multiserver design such as Genode's.

[Quackdoc]

glad crap is going, but once again I wish there was a sort of "Stable dkms" alternative we could use to keep these drivers working out of tree

[AmericanLocomotive]

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.

This absurdity has got to end. I remember people saying that back in the mid-late 2000s. However the context was a lot different. When people said "Linux has good hardware compatibility with older hardware", they meant that a "new" Distro released in 2008 worked pretty decently on their old Pentium 3 laptop from 2001.

Now we have people questioning whether it's a good idea or not to drop support for those same 2001-era wireless cards in 2023. We're talking about wireless cards that could be up to 24 years old. That's like being in 2005, the era of 64-bit dual core processors and 4GB of RAM, and questioning if its wise that Linux won't support the original 16-bit IBM PC hardware from 1981.

[uid313]

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.

No, today all modern devices have integrated Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and NFC. Sometimes even 4G or 5G.

[unwind-protect]

Not a fan of removing network drivers of all things. Cuts machines off connectivity unless you use PLIP or something.

[AmericanLocomotive]

Not a fan of removing network drivers of all things. Cuts machines off connectivity unless you use PLIP or something.

Oh no, your 500MHz 24 year old laptop with 128MB of RAM won't be able to access the internet if you update it to the latest Kernel! Any laptop that old, with that little ram will barely be able to function with any kind of remotely modern distribution, let alone do anything on the internet which would bring it to its knees. Even if you managed to somehow hack a modern kernel into a much older and simpler distribution, that is not enough memory or processing power to do anything practical on the internet.

You then might argue that you don't use your 24 year old laptop for browsing. It's being used as some esoteric glorified IoT device. Like an internet print server, or you have a big USB harddrive plugged into it so it functions has a poor man's NAS. My counter to that is for $25, you can get a Raspberry Pi that will greatly out perform it in literally every metric while consuming a fraction of the power, and be supported by Linux for many more years to come.

You then might counter that it could be a very specific network attached computer with some proprietary hardware running some big industrial machine. My response to that, is that there is no reason for such a machine to ever have its kernel updated. Mission critical production computers are not connected to the internet.

[guglovich]

They're so PS3 early. I agree about the rest.

[unwind-protect]

Oh no, your 500MHz 24 year old laptop with 128MB of RAM won't be able to access the internet if you update it to the latest Kernel! Any laptop that old, with that little ram will barely be able to function with any kind of remotely modern distribution, let alone do anything on the internet which would bring it to its knees. Even if you managed to somehow hack a modern kernel into a much older and simpler distribution, that is not enough memory or processing power to do anything practical on the internet.

You then might argue that you don't use your 24 year old laptop for browsing. It's being used as some esoteric glorified IoT device. Like an internet print server, or you have a big USB harddrive plugged into it so it functions has a poor man's NAS. My counter to that is for $25, you can get a Raspberry Pi that will greatly out perform it in literally every metric while consuming a fraction of the power, and be supported by Linux for many more years to come.

You then might counter that it could be a very specific network attached computer with some proprietary hardware running some big industrial machine. My response to that, is that there is no reason for such a machine to ever have its kernel updated. Mission critical production computers are not connected to the internet.

I'm more thinking of using an old laptop as a terminal and ssh in and out of it.

A Raspberry Pi needs a monitor, which if bought new is $100.

But hey, most laptops of that area have a parallel port, so PLIP is an option

[NotMine999]

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

If it is a kernel where old code is dumped after being excized from mainline, then I could see some reason for it as a way to preserve that old code (prevent it from disappearing in the massive bit bucket at the end of the Internet).

If it is a kernel that is mean to to be compiled into something useful, then no because of the resource requirements to port & adjust all that code to make it compile again.

Still, if such a kernel existed could you imagine all the whiny posts that could result from folks trying to compile that old code and getting nothing but failures for their efforts?