From owner-freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG Thu Apr 5 18:51:20 2007 Return-Path: X-Original-To: freebsd-current@freebsd.org Delivered-To: freebsd-current@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.freebsd.org (mx1.freebsd.org [69.147.83.52]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 1C6EB16A405 for ; Thu, 5 Apr 2007 18:51:20 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from lists@jnielsen.net) Received: from ns1.jnielsen.net (ns1.jnielsen.net [69.55.238.237]) by mx1.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id D2C9F13C469 for ; Thu, 5 Apr 2007 18:51:19 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from lists@jnielsen.net) Received: from localhost (jn@ns1 [69.55.238.237]) (authenticated bits=0) by ns1.jnielsen.net (8.12.9p2/8.12.9) with ESMTP id l35IGQfW015731; Thu, 5 Apr 2007 14:16:26 -0400 (EDT) (envelope-from lists@jnielsen.net) From: John Nielsen To: freebsd-current@freebsd.org Date: Thu, 5 Apr 2007 14:15:21 -0400 User-Agent: KMail/1.9.6 References: <20070405103708.GC842@turion.vk2pj.dyndns.org> In-Reply-To: X-Face: #X5#Y*q>F:]zT!DegL3z5Xo'^MN[$8k\[4^3rN~wm=s=Uw(sW}R?3b^*f1Wu*.<=?utf-8?q?of=5F4NrS=0A=09P*M/9CpxDo!D6?=)IY1w<9B1jB; tBQf[RU-R<,I)e"$q7N7 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Disposition: inline Message-Id: <200704051415.21905.lists@jnielsen.net> X-Virus-Scanned: ClamAV version 0.88.4, clamav-milter version 0.88.4 on ns1.jnielsen.net X-Virus-Status: Clean Cc: Nikolas Britton Subject: Re: Do we need this junk? X-BeenThere: freebsd-current@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5 Precedence: list List-Id: Discussions about the use of FreeBSD-current List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Thu, 05 Apr 2007 18:51:20 -0000 On Thursday 05 April 2007 11:39:41 am Nikolas Britton wrote: > On 4/5/07, Peter Jeremy wrote: > > [-stable removed since it's not relevant there] > > > > On 2007-Apr-05 04:58:17 -0500, Nikolas Britton wrote: > > >Can anything in the list below be removed from CURRENT? > > > > > >legacyfree1# cd dev/ > > >legacyfree1# grep -irsn isa ./ | grep -i include > > > > ... > > > > >legacyfree1# grep -irsn mca ./ | grep -i include > > > > ... > > > > Why do you believe anything in the list might need to be removed? > > I'd like to also add that 6-STABLE should be the last branch to support: > 1. ISA / EISA > 2. PC98 Platform. > 3. i486 > 4. i586 > > 98.83% of us have at least a i686 and 62.6% of us have at least a i786 > (SSE2) processor. > > Arch Break Down > i386 5586 94.02% > amd64 305 5.13% > sparc64 30 0.50% > > x86 Break Down: > i486 30 0.074% > ??? 51 0.125% > i586 404 0.995% > i686 14724 36.230% > i786 25431 62.576% > ----------------------------------- > Tot: 40640 100% > > data provided by bsdstats.org Age alone is a lousy reason to drop support for any given piece of hardware. In fact, I consider the fact that it will install & run on whatever secondhand hardware you might happen to run across to be a major selling point of FreeBSD. As long as it's inclusion doesn't hamper advancements in other areas and there is someone to maintain it, support for more hardware new or old is always a good thing IMO. If you don't want to use it, take it out of your kernel config. The point of GENERIC is to cover as many different hardware setups as is reasonable, with emphasis on storage and network devices (without which it's difficult if not impossible to bootstrap or update a system). If you don't want to use the support then build a custom kernel without it. (But you don't lose much by leaving it alone.) The numbers on bsdstats.org, while useful in demonstrating that there are _at least_ a given number of machines using certain hardware, should probably not be relied upon at this point for any other conclusions, especially regarding the (unknown but certainly a majority) portion of machines that are not represented. In any case, patches speak louder than words. If you wanted to work on producing a highly functional legacy-free kernel tree (which maybe you are, for your unspecified new architecture mentioned in another thread), I'm sure that your work would not be ill-received. JN