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| Message-ID | <69f3dd7c@news.ausics.net> (permalink) |
|---|---|
| From | not@telling.you.invalid (Computer Nerd Kev) |
| Subject | Re: AI Is Killing Some Legacy Hardware Support |
| Newsgroups | comp.os.linux.misc |
| References | (13 earlier) <10sphtg$ka69$1@news1.tnib.de> <69f13be9@news.ausics.net> <wwvse8eurrp.fsf@LkoBDZeT.terraraq.uk> <69f28e2d@news.ausics.net> <wwvik98dguu.fsf@LkoBDZeT.terraraq.uk> |
| Date | 2026-05-01 08:53 +1000 |
| Organization | Ausics - https://newsgroups.ausics.net |
Richard Kettlewell <invalid@invalid.invalid> wrote:
> In short, yes, if what you want is old hardware then you are going to be
> constantly experiencing decline in support for it in modern software.
This does not surprise me. In your terms all I was proposing is
that Linux support appears to be declining now faster than BSD, and
I believe that warrants my investigation. I was vaguely hoping for
a response like "yes I see the BSD I'm using fixed a similar issue
in driver x and has a group of people working on supporting
PCMCIA", or even "no way, all the BSDs never had those drivers or
dropped them years ago already" (I've since confirmed they do at
least still have a driver for my Xircom PCMCIA ethernet card that
Linux is dropping). Instead I got all these "duh, your hardware
must be from 30 years ago and useless anyway so who cares"
responses. Ho hum.
>> https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=b3c26ea81ccc522e77ed0b1707add61fc9206216
>
> That's a revealing one to quote:
>
> | The i82092 driver has almost certainly not been used in over 20 years.
> | It was broken by a null pointer dereference since the dawn of Git
> | history (2.6.12-rc2 in 2005) until someone fixed it in 2021 in commit
> | e39cdacf2f66 ("pcmcia: i82092: fix a null pointer dereference bug").
> | From their dmesg log [3], it is clear they were testing in an emulated
> | environment and not on real hardware.
>
> i.e. one of the drivers went a minimum of 15 years with nobody noticing
> that it was broken. Some of this stuff was already unmaintained to the
> point of being broken 20 years ago or more.
Though The Xircom driver was working for me and they're removing it
now, so I _know_ they consider useful (to me) drivers for removal
too and the significant thing is they are considering all the
PCMCIA drivers "almost completely obsolete", so the problem for me
is likely to get worse.
Plus I guessed (maybe ignorantly) they'd drop common 1990s PC
hardware drivers while keeping drivers from 2000s for a decade
after doing that. But if "~2009" is "almost completely obsolete"
that means their idea of "obsolete" has overtaken mine and
therefore I might be using the wrong OS. (yes I know the reasons
why they might define obsolete differently, including developer
resources and funding, in the end that doesn't really matter to
me _if_ the BSDs turn out to be different)
> (AFAIK the Linux kernel handles null pointer dereferences quite well so
> this was probably just an availability bug rather than any kind of
> vulnerability.)
>
>> Yes I get your point not to complain about what you get for free, but
>> like I say the BSDs have the same price tag, and if Linux starts
>> forcing me to spend time and money on upgrading to new (old) hardware
>> every few years (or more money buying brand new hardware to get driver
>> support for longer) when my old hardware still runs all the
>> application software I use, is it really free for me?
>
> The point is not so much about complaining, nobody can stop you doing
> that, but about the realistic expectations about maintenance and, in the
> longer term, availability of drivers for very old hardware. If what you
> want is ancient hardware then you get to deal with the consequences of
> that, and those consequences are (at least very broadly) predictable.
I _could_ use all your reasoning to predict that the very moment a
model of PC hardware device goes out of production and all the
associated manufacturers are no longer contractually or legally
obliged to support it, support will be removed from the Linux
kernel, at least once the first new bug is discovered. That clearly
has not been happening as a rule so far, or all these drivers would
have been dropped already decades ago. I would go out and buy new
hardware all the time pointlessly based on that. Much smarter to
look at what's actually happening, and my point is that this
includes looking at BSD too.
> The BSDs are maintained by different people with different priorities,
> so the outcomes are likely to differ. But they do face related
> pressures, and they do sometimes remove functionality for various
> reasons.
>
> For example here's a PCMCIA driver being removed from OpenBSD in 2020;
> it was broken and (I infer) nobody was sufficiently interested in it to
> fix it.
>
> https://github.com/openbsd/src/commit/1f9d569892d2e153e862c87145e03403415b4ee0
OK thanks, that's an interesting point of data, but unlike with the
Linux removals it's not obviously tied to claims about what PC
hardware the developers consider obsolete, or a broader project to
remove PCMCIA support entirely. Really it's the working drivers
being removed, like the Xircom one, that I care about, and Linux
just happens to have started with broken PCMCIA drivers before
moving on to them. Maybe the BSDs will do that too, it's what I
intend to investagate. So far that "esp" driver still seems to be
in NetBSD, working or not, FWIW.
--
__ __
#_ < |\| |< _#
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Re: AI Is Killing Some Legacy Hardware Support not@telling.you.invalid (Computer Nerd Kev) - 2026-04-30 09:03 +1000
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Re: AI Is Killing Some Legacy Hardware Support rbowman <bowman@montana.com> - 2026-04-29 03:42 +0000
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