After A Delay, ISA Drivers Will Be Kept Around Until FreeBSD 15

FreeBSD 14.0-RC4 was issued today and as a last minute change they have decided to keep (non-PNP) ISA and GIANT-locked drivers around until FreeBSD 15.

FreeBSD 14 had been the point at which they planned to drop ISA drivers and GIANT-locked drivers but their removal has now been delayed to FreeBSD 15. Some of the ISA sound card drivers, for example, though were already dropped during the FreeBSD 14 cycle. Several ISA drivers had been dropped already such as reports of some of the sound drivers not even being functional for over a decade. Yes, old Industry Standard Architecture hardware.

This change delayed the overall removal of non-PNP ISA device drivers until FreeBSD 15.

Similarly, this change now reflects drivers with the GIANT lock will be removed before FreeBSD 15. FreeBSD's giant lock as the name implies is for locking the kernel to maintain concurrency within multi-core computing environments, similar to the Linux big kernel lock (BKL).

Besides reflecting the delay in removing ISA and GIANT-locked drivers to FreeBSD 15, FreeBSD 14.0-RC4 also has an OpenZFS update, and a Hyper-V emulation fix within QEMU.

More details on today's FreeBSD 14.0-RC4 release via the mailing list. The official FreeBSD 14.0 stable release is expected to happen around 14 November.