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Date:      Thu, 4 Oct 2018 08:44:11 +0000
From:      Alexey Dokuchaev <danfe@FreeBSD.org>
To:        Brooks Davis <brooks@freebsd.org>
Cc:        freebsd-arch@freebsd.org, freebsd-net@freebsd.org, freebsd-stable@freebsd.org, freebsd-fcp@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: FCP-0101: Deprecating most 10/100 Ethernet drivers
Message-ID:  <20181004084411.GA50348@FreeBSD.org>
In-Reply-To: <20181003210516.GA71565@spindle.one-eyed-alien.net>
References:  <20181003210516.GA71565@spindle.one-eyed-alien.net>

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On Wed, Oct 03, 2018 at 09:05:16PM +0000, Brooks Davis wrote:
> FCP-01010 (https://github.com/freebsd/fcp/blob/master/fcp-0101.md)
> outlines a plan to deprecate most 10/100 Ethernet drivers in FreeBSD 12

Holy shit!  OK I guess I can understand removing 10 (I personally haven't
seen one in a very long time) but 100 are omnipresent and most of my NICs
are in fact 100.

> and remove them in FreeBSD 13 to reduce the burden of maintaining and
> improving the network stack.

Looking at the commits they require near zero maintenance.  What exactly
is the burden here?  Another question: why the fuck FreeBSD likes to kill
non-broken, low-volatile and perfectly working stuff?  We offer probably
the best NIC driver support on the block, yet you're proposing to shrink
one of the few areas where we shine.  WTF?!

> The current list of drivers slated for REMOVAL is:
> 
> ae, bfe, bm, cs, dme, ed, ep, ex, fe, pcn, rl, sf, smc, sn,
> ste, tl, tx, txp, vx, wb, xe

ae(4) was used in Asus EeePC 701/900 which are still popular among hackers.
My home router uses sf(4) happily.  It's a dual-port card and I don't want
to look for expensive and completely needless replacement.  Other people
have already told you about ed/rl/etc.

> Please reply to this message with nominations to the exception list.

As it can be seen this list tends to cover nearly all 100 cards, yet no
one (pardon me if I missed those) asks for 10.  So how about making this
proposal cover only 10 cards, if you can't resist the itch to remove
something from the tree?

./danfe



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