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Date:      Fri, 21 Nov 2014 10:55:33 -0500
From:      John Baldwin <jhb@freebsd.org>
To:        John-Mark Gurney <jmg@funkthat.com>
Cc:        arch@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: I'd like to axe some drivers
Message-ID:  <2540829.zyhqHXzioZ@ralph.baldwin.cx>
In-Reply-To: <20141120220752.GI24601@funkthat.com>
References:  <201411201631.27556.jhb@freebsd.org> <20141120220752.GI24601@funkthat.com>

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On Thursday, November 20, 2014 02:07:52 PM John-Mark Gurney wrote:
> I'm fine w/ removing these...  Should we do some house cleaning on
> amd64's GENERIC too?

I'd rather not diverge this thread too much.

> amd64's GENERIC has a lot of ISA or 100Mbit ethernet cards that are
> clearly not going to be used on these machines...

I think ISA might make sense.  I think 100Mbit PCI ethernet is not as
obvious.  One of my previous desktops (an Athlon64 machine) had pcn as
its on-board Ethernet.

> My recommended list to remove:
> ae, bfe, dc, fxp, hme?, pcn, rl, tx, vr, wb, xl, cs, ed, ex, ep, fe,
> sn, xe
> 
> All of these are modules, so if someone really needs them, they can
> load the module...

One thing that might help is that if pccard grows the same ability as
USB to auto-load modules on insert (I feel like pccardd did this in
4.x, so this might still work via devd now?), we could remove most of
the ISA drivers from GENERIC on both i386 and amd64 that are nowadays
only going to be used for pccard (that's pretty much all the ISA NICs
aside from ie(4)).  (And pccard things still work in CardBus slots, so
are still possibly relevant for 64-bit laptops with CardBus.)

-- 
John Baldwin



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