On Tue, Mar 26, 2013 at 11:13, Mark Kettenis wrote: >> Date: Tue, 26 Mar 2013 05:20:27 -0400 >> From: Ted Unangst <t...@tedunangst.com> >> >> These isa devs are already disabled and not particularly popular among >> our users. affected: tcic, sea, wds, eg, el > > The reason these devices are disabled is probably that their probe > routines are destructive. So the fact that they are disabled doesn't > necessarily mean that they don't work properly. > > I don't think maintaining these drivers is currently a huge burden on > us. But decoupling them from the build will almost certainly lead to > some degree of bitrot.
Perfection is achieved when there's nothing left to take away. :) It's not so much that we spend time maintaining the source, but I do spend time compiling it. And I have to download it (3 times!) every time I install a new snapshot. Cumulatively, I've probably spent hours of my life waiting for these drivers' bits to go from here to there. I will selfishly claim that if I save five minutes of time this year by not compiling these files, that right there is more benefit than retaining support. I targeted disabled devices figuring they were least likely to be missed, but I honestly question the utility of any of these ISA network and SCSI drivers. They're going to be slow as shit. Besides, at this point, due to adding so many new drivers (kernel size has more than doubled in last ten years) the minimum RAM requirement is basically past ISA only machines. The segment of machines that lack PCI but support 32M or more of RAM is very narrow. And unlike sparc or vax, I don't think running OpenBSD on some ancient 486 is historically interesting.
