Date: Sat, 07 Apr 2007 18:44:06 +1000 From: Michael Vince <mv@thebeastie.org> To: Nikolas Britton <nikolas.britton@gmail.com> Cc: FreeBSD Current <freebsd-current@freebsd.org> Subject: Re: Do we need this junk? Message-ID: <461759D6.3000407@thebeastie.org> In-Reply-To: <ef10de9a0704051056o55ea757di3d85b79f8503619b@mail.gmail.com> References: <ef10de9a0704050258l4ea754b3n99a1239a81b844a0@mail.gmail.com> <86zm5nrllc.fsf@dwp.des.no> <ef10de9a0704051056o55ea757di3d85b79f8503619b@mail.gmail.com>
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Nikolas Britton wrote: > On 4/5/07, Dag-Erling Smørgrav <des@des.no> wrote: >> "Nikolas Britton" <nikolas.britton@gmail.com> writes: >> > Can anything in the list below be removed from CURRENT? >> >> No. Modern i386 and amd64 still have an ISA bus, and devices >> connected to that bus, even if they don't have ISA slots. >> > > What you speak of is the LPC bus. LPC is intended to be a > motherboard-only bus. No connector is defined, and no LPC peripheral > daughterboards are available. > > So I come back to the question of why we have external devices from > 1987 still floating around in the kernel and more importantly why > these devices are enabled by default in the GENERIC kern conf? > > http://www.intel.com/design/chipsets/industry/25128901.pdf I tend to agree with you Nikolas, This kind of discussion has come up in the past and what makes it a bit more interesting is we again see posts from people proudly saying they are running up to 40 486's and Pentium 1's, last time this type of discussion came up some one told me they were running over 50 pentium 1 servers of services (not mini routers etc). This is at the time when global warming/energy reduction is in a media frenzy spotlight on a almost now permanent basis, this also includes technology like virtualization. Why these machines can't be placed onto a single modern core 2 server under virtualization like jails is beyond me. This also reminds me of when a gentlemen from Nvidia posted ideas for the FreeBSD kernel so that they could better support their chipsets on FreeBSD, some mailing list users blasted him. That said everyones entitled to their opinion but you can't argue with majority of the posts that are against your ideas, as they tend to control FreeBSD's direction and for the most part I tend to believe they know whats best then I do. I choose to view FreeBSD as a OS that is out to try please everyone, even if it does provide a larger amount of convenience to those with a 486 then a Core 2 CPU thats what its about. Weather it could work better the other way around is something I don't know, forcing people to recompile bits back into the kernel for their PC-98/486 might work or it might force a new fork of FreeBSD. I think it's reasonable to think that there can be a mix up in users belief on what FreeBSD is about and where it's focus is on, for example the "about" part of FreeBSD's web site tends to be worded on a more modern advanced focused OS ( http://www.freebsd.org/about.html ) but at the same time it does list PC-98. Mike
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