Long-Obsolete DECnet Networking Code In The Linux Kernel Expected To Finally Be Removed

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Long-Obsolete DECnet Networking Code In The Linux Kernel Expected To Finally Be Removed

DECnet as a set of networking protocols from Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) that date back to 1975 are expected to be finally removed from the Linux kernel. The DECnet protocols have long been obsolete, the Linux kernel implementation has been orphaned for more than one decade, and is code that belongs more in a history museum than the mainline kernel...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-DECnet-2022-Removal

[CochainComplex]

Was/(is) it maybe used in old military systems? maybe just some backup systems for basic communication and therefore it was kept as fallback compatibilty?

[DRanged]

When they remove it, it will be 12000 lines of code less to worry about

[oiaohm]

Was/(is) it maybe used in old military systems? maybe just some backup systems for basic communication and therefore it was kept as fallback compatibilty?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DECnet

Its one of the losers of the the Protocol Wars. There was a time before TCP/IP dominated when each vendor device had their own unique networking protocols.

DECnet is Digital Equipment Corporation stuff and they don't exist any more. There was the IBM SNA and the Xerox XNS. Yes each of these could not talk to each other.

It was the military and governments demanding common standards that basically ended the protocol wars leading to tcp/ip domination.

[CommunityMember]

DECnet is Digital Equipment Corporation stuff and they don't exist any more.

And yet the successor companies (Compaq and HPE) still do exist, and without DEC, Ethernet (on which some versions of DECnet ran on) might not exist today (Intel and Xerox were part of the standard, but DEC made it real). If one visits the Computer History Museum, DEC plays an important part of the history of computing (and the DEC PDP-1 is demo'ed regularly).

[ezst036]

Now this. This, is ancient. When I hear people talking some craziness like first generation Ryzens are ancient because they want a few more frames per second through optimizations, it makes me want to eat my car keys. There's too much of a willingness to torture the language.

[pegasus]

DECNet, removed? ButButBut ... what about my VAX in my basement?

Seriously, once upon a time I had a microvax in my basement and managed to get a scrap 486 running linux to talk to it via decnet. Must have been about 20 years ago. Fun times ... but yes, a museum technology. Proper digital archeology and good learning opportunity

[coder]

I can imagine someone, somewhere has legacy VMS apps running in an emulator and interfaces to them through this stack.

[DrYak]

and managed to get a scrap 486 running linux to talk to it via decnet. Must have been about 20 years ago.

And typically, you won't be in a hurry to update that 20yo 486 to kernel 6.0, you could merely update it to kernel 5.19 and still talk to the microvax~
as that update won't support the latest 32bit fixes for Red Bleed anyway~

:-D

[CochainComplex]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DECnet

Its one of the losers of the the Protocol Wars. There was a time before TCP/IP dominated when each vendor device had their own unique networking protocols.

DECnet is Digital Equipment Corporation stuff and they don't exist any more. There was the IBM SNA and the Xerox XNS. Yes each of these could not talk to each other.

It was the military and governments demanding common standards that basically ended the protocol wars leading to tcp/ip domination.

Thx for clarifying