On 28 May, 2015, at 17:57 , Tyler Retzlaff <r...@omicron-persei-8.net> wrote: > On 5/28/2015 12:39 PM, Robert Swindells wrote: >> Radoslaw Kujawa <radoslaw.kuj...@c0ff33.net> wrote: >> >> The same arguments might be made against the plan to remove ATM >> support. > > I've got no problem with keeping it, removing it isn't really intellectually > rewarding I thought it more of a cleanup/chore that nobody really wanted to > do. I only suggested removal because I know the code is broken. > > I guess we could at least make it compile again if we kept it and add it to > the ALL kernels. Is that enough? It's likely to still be broken and > difficult to efficiently fix without any hardware though.
A long time ago I wrote code to support ATM interfaces for routers that had the hardware. I'm pretty sure they sold quite a few of those interfaces and were still selling them not that long ago; ADSL uses ATM framing and some carriers had ATM networks for backhaul until they could no longer afford to pay the switch vendors to maintain them. I think you would say those routers supported ATM, and I don't recall any complaints about that support being incomplete in some way, yet that code did nothing similar to the stuff in sys/netnatm. I know of no application which requires that and it clearly isn't necessary to do something useful with ATM interfaces that people were willing to spend (not inconsiderable) money for without it. I would be much more impressed if someone stepped up, said they knew what that code did and described what they would use it for if the code actually worked. As it is I believe that code not only doesn't work but would have no utility if it did and probably wasn't a good idea even when it was first included in the kernel and you could still buy the hardware. If someone had ATM hardware they wanted to support they still wouldn't need that code and would probably be better off if it were absent so they wouldn't think the driver should be dependent on it. If the idea of removing this causes angst I can't see how anything can be removed, ever. Dennis Ferguson