FreeBSD Is Looking To Drop Many Of Its 10/100 Ethernet Drivers

FreeBSD is looking to deprecate "most" of their 10/100 Ethernet drivers in FreeBSD 12 so that they can be dropped entirely in FreeBSD 13, but not everyone wants to see these older networking drivers dismissed.

FreeBSD kernel developers want to drop most of their in-kernel 10/100 Ethernet drivers due to the maintenance burden involved and they just being burdensome to keep up as they look to further enhance their networking stack.

The current list of their networking drivers that would be dropped include ae, bfe, bm, cs, dme, ed, ep, ex, fe, pcn, rl, sf, smc, sn, ste, tl, tx, txp, vx, wb, and xe. A few drivers would be kept for popular hardware that is still being used today, well supported still, and is keeping up with current FreeBSD networking interfaces. That initial list includes dc, ffec, fxpl, hme, le, sis, vr, and xl.

This call for deprecating most of their 10/100 Ethernet drivers was made on the FreeBSD mailing list. Of course, not everyone is happy about this and some are objecting to a few of the drivers proposed for removal... Most of the objections are from hardware still being used by individuals/organizations or fundamentally preferring FreeBSD for its long-time hardware support. We'll see what happens for the FreeBSD 12 deprecation period and what ultimately gets dropped for FreeBSD 13.