freebsd stable - Oct 2018 - FCP-0101: Deprecating most 10/100 Ethernet drivers

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

> 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
> and remove them in FreeBSD 13 to reduce the burden of maintaining and
> improving the network stack. >
> 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
>
> Please reply to this message with nominations to the exception list.
Sill using my Asus EeePC 701 (just bought a new battery pack) for 
FreeBSD with ae nic (and I do not foresee discontinuing its use any time 
soon as its serial port comes in handy for talking to other serial devices).

## Alexey Dokuchaev (danfe at FreeBSD.org):
> > 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.
Don't panic - they're talking about removing the 100 MBps NICS, not
the 100 GBps NICs.

Jokes aside - obviously there are very different populations of NICS.
Here, the only 100MBps interface is in the IP phone, and I would guess
that even most consumer hardware comes with a GBps interface on board
(heck, even RPis have a GBit interface, even if can't use more than 30%
of it's bandwith). Checking with a hardware-dealer: very few NICs in
their catalog are 100MBps, most are gigabit-grade.
I would have expected that things look different in the embedded world...
On the other hand, some data centers I know routinely use 10GBps, and
1 GBps is considered "legacy" there.

So, perceptions are very different... let's keep this rational and
make a list of cards still in use.

Regards,
Christoph

-- 
Spare Space

Alexey Dokuchaev <danfe at FreeBSD.org> writes:
> Looking at the commits they require near zero maintenance.
Please do not confuse ?nobody is maintaining them? with ?they don't need
maintenance?, because they do.  And please assume good faith.  Brooks
asked for people to speak up if they care about some of the drivers he
proposed to remove; all you had to do was say ?I still use this driver?.
There was no need to attack him, much less to swear.

DES
-- 
Dag-Erling Sm?rgrav - des at des.no

On Thu, Oct 4, 2018 at 2:45 AM Alexey Dokuchaev <danfe at freebsd.org>
wrote:
> Looking at the commits they require near zero maintenance.  What exactly
> is the burden here?
>
I believe that characterization is incorrect. There's a burden. And it's
death of a thousand cuts. And many of those cuts have been inflicted on
brooks at .

Most of these drivers have had dozens or hundreds of commits each over the
years to keep up with the API changes. This acts as a tax on innovation
because it's such a pain in the back side to change all the drivers in the
tree. I did a back of the envelope computation that this is on the order of
hundreds of hours of time, spread across all the drivers over all the years
we've supported them. Some of these drivers are clearly unused, and so
that's 100% wasted effort. Most of these drivers are on machines that most
likely won't be able to run 13.0 well when it comes out in 2 years due to
increased memory demands that it will almost certainly have. The declining
use means we anticipate that if we were to maintain them until 13, it would
be wasted effort for at least some on the list.

That's why that one way to get the driver off the list is to convert to
iflib. That greatly reduces the burden by centralizing all the stupid,
common things of a driver so that we only have to change one place, not
dozens.

At the root of this problem is the community's long resistance to having
data reported back to the project data about the machines running FreeBSD.
Absent any real and significant data, the only way to know if things are
unused is to ask. We cannot have the act of merely asking cause people to
freak out and hurl expletives all over the place. That's significantly not
cool.

Warner

On Thu, Oct 04, 2018 at 08:44:11AM +0000, Alexey Dokuchaev
wrote:
> 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.
Sigh.  If you really plan to still be using i386 and 10/100 ether in
2024, perhaps you should consider NetBSD.

You can buy used core i5 laptops for around $20 if you shop around.

mcl

On 2018-Oct-04 08:44:11 +0000, Alexey Dokuchaev <danfe at FreeBSD.org>
wrote:
>Looking at the commits they require near zero maintenance.  What exactly
>is the burden here?
As various others have stated, this isn't true.  All the code in FreeBSD has
an ongoing maintenance cost and is an impediment to adding new features.
There is no point in spending valuable developer effort to update drivers
and test them with unusual/obsolete hardware unless those drivers are going
to actually be used.
>Another question: why the fuck FreeBSD likes to kill
>non-broken, low-volatile and perfectly working stuff?
That language is uncalled for.
>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?!
Supporting NICs that no-one uses doesn't benefit anyone.  No-one is talking
about removing NICs that are in active use.
>ae(4) was used in Asus EeePC 701/900 which are still popular among hackers.
Those netbooks are more than a decade old now and I don't expect many are
still functional.  Will people still expect to use them with FreeBSD 13 in 5
years time?
>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,
What is the purpose in keeping unused FastEthernet cards in the tree?
>if you can't resist the itch to remove
>something from the tree?
Again, that language is uncalled for.

-- 
Peter Jeremy
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