Linux 6.13 To Drop Fieldbus Just Five Years After Being Merged

[WileEPyote]

Seems like the Kernel is missing some maintainers, good thing they do all they can to keep every maintainer and not just exclude them because of current politics.

Oh, don't start this shit again. It happened. You can't change it. Deal with it.

[mos87]

It took a single dumb post on the first page LOL.

Anyway there's a somewhat extensive discussion of what is Fieldbus in the previous topic on this issue.

[sophisticles]

It certainly doesn't run on winblows, macose or bsd. So yeah, when comes to general purpose OS'es the World runs on Linux.

I don't know what kind of drugs you are on, but you are wrong.

The PS3, PS4 and PS5 all run a BSD based OS, in the medical field where i worked desktop workstations were almost always Windows, with some Ubuntu thrown in, in the music, TV and movie industry I can tell you for a fact that most systems run either Windows or Mac OS.

My guess is that you are just a troll and not a very good one, so you just say stuff that you know is wrong to entertain yourself.

[DavidBrown]

I would it would have reduced to two questions:

1. is Fieldbus actually used today anywhere?

If not - who then really cares if it is removed?
If yes then

Industrial "fieldbuses" in general are used everywhere in factory automation. Pretty much anywhere that you have two or more "machines" with a common controller, there will be a fieldbus involved.

That does not mean that the particular flavour of "fieldbus" in the kernel is found everywhere, and certainly does not mean that the interface card supported by the driver is common. I've only looked a little at the code in question, but it appears to be for a high speed RS-485 based protocol. Such protocols are rare in modern installations, but still very common in old installations.

2. Is the Linux implementation of the Fieldbus spec actually used today?

if not - not much point again - sort of like the Bible translated into Klingon.
if yes - then why isn't one the users of this code stepping up to act as maintainer?

I would be very surprised if the fieldbus stuff in the Linux kernel is in significant usage today. Industrial communication is done from userspace, or using more specialised hardware (like PLCs), or on Windows systems. (Windows is an insane choice of OS for critical systems that you will want to keep running for decades, but that's the way it is.)

The people who make systems using fieldbuses are automation engineers - they have no knowledge or interest in the Linux kernel, and are usually blissfully ignorant of whether the PLC they are programming runs Linux, embedded Windows, or a proprietary OS. Companies making PLCs or hardware interfaces might have something to gain, but they are mostly too competitive to share with others.

[DavidBrown]

Presumably it is being done where it should be, as a user space program or library.

I'm really not sure why everything now needs to be done in the Kernel. We've got web servers, display managers, SMB/NFS network connections all in Kernel... It's starting to look like 1990s Windows....

As far as I can tell, the "fieldbus" stuff in the kernel was an attempt to get generic support for many types of industrial communication in place, along with driver support for a specific interface card. This might have been a good idea if it was followed up by adding more such support, but that never materialised. So the fieldbus code would only have been used by a few people with that specific (outdated, I believe) interface card.

There were actually valid reasons for trying to put some of this kind of stuff in the kernel. In particular, some industrial communication is high speed and requires low latency and deterministic timing - polls or updates that run hundreds of times a second with a 1 millisecond timing margin have traditionally been very hard to achieve in user space. But that is changing now with real-time Linux becoming better integrated, along with multiple core processors even on small embedded systems (a rarity just five years ago). In addition, it used to be common for interfaces for specialised industrial protocols to be in the form of add-in cards for PCI buses, ISA buses (remember that? It lasted far longer in the industrial world than the normal PC world) and others. For such cards, a kernel driver is almost a necessity. Now, these are all connected by USB if they are not handled by normal Ethernet interfaces. And USB (and Ethernet) can be handled efficiently from user space.

[varikonniemi]

LOL - when they do the next 300k conscriptions, or the 300k conscriptions after that, maybe you'll figure it out... This isn't a shooting war, it's an economic war.

I admit you to be right when that happens. But it won't happen, they have more than enough volunteers. And because they have only 10% of the losses what western media tells you, the army will soon be 1.5 million strong which is enough for anything short of world war 3.

About the economy, Russia is growing far faster than the west who are shrinking or struggling. According to world bank Russia recently overtook Japan to become the fourth largest economy in the world. So the economic war is going as bad as the shooting war for the west.

[DavidBrown]

I don't work in embedded so I might be talking out of my ass (even more than usual!), but AFAIU this is somewhat industry dependent. E.g. automotive uses CAN bus a lot. There also seems to be a plethora of 'industrial ethernet' standards becoming increasingly popular. Some add just sturdier cabling than the standard optics or twisted pair, but there's also a bunch of stuff for making ethernet usable for real-time and/or safety-critical stuff.

I do work in embedded development - and more importantly, I also work (occasionally) with industrial automation. You are correct here. Ethernet is the dominant technology for all but the cheapest or oldest industrial automation communication over distance. Some of it is quite specialised Ethernet, such as EtherCAT or ProfiNet. In parts of the world where labour is far cheaper than parts, it might still make sense to use something else.

Note that the term "Fieldbus" is often a generic term, but some of the countless "standards" for industrial communications try to claim it for themselves. People who actually do industrial automation don't use the term precisely because it is too meaningless, but there are companies that have it in their marketing and promotion.

[8r34k0u7_57y13]

Why do they need a blog?

I understand the other misgivings, but it's being kicked for not having a social media presence?

[Volta]

According to some "well informed" people on this forum "the world runs on Linux" so I find this hard to believe:

LOL.

It certainly doesn't run on winblows, macose or bsd. So yeah, when comes to general purpose OS'es the World runs on Linux.

[Volta]

Grow up. Politics and national security have always been a thing and now that the world quite literally runs on code you have to consider both seriously and constantly.

That's why israeli and USA maintainers should be kept as far as possible from the kernel. Next time nietanhuyu will blow up your PC if you're pollitically incorrect. China and Russia are putting backdoors from their original addresses. Yeah, fucking right. Grow up.