Comments on: XNS gone, nobody say anything

By: Glen Nowakowski

Glen Nowakowski — Sat, 08 Jan 2011 19:00:09 +0000

I use the paralell ports on Dragonfly – not every EE showoff is Arduino spoiled.
Parallel ports still have a use. Please don’t nix ’em – I just jumped off the FreeBSD bandwagon, I’m not looking to return so soon! :(

By: Sascha Wildner

Sascha Wildner — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 23:55:39 +0000

Personally, I’ve stopped listening to comments starting with “no one uses…” :)

I see those contradicted so many times.

I’m fine with removing things if they get in the way. Like XNS, which wasn’t adjusted to a previous change that Matt did to all the network protocols.

By: blinkkin

blinkkin — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 18:24:17 +0000

As for hosting service for DragonFly BSD, getting support for Xen domU would be great. There was a lot of talk that Xen is dying – RedHat 6 removed support for it and so on. Now Fedora 14 is getting is back, thanks to Amazon EC2.

By: Justin Sherrill

Justin Sherrill — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 01:15:39 +0000

I’ve found that using serial or parallel port hardware is sometimes the only affordable way to go. One of my coworkers has to use a serial cable to communicate with some PLC equipment; the USB version of the cable costs over USD$1000! It’s cheaper to buy crappy old laptops and throw them away when they die, for years.

By: Justin Sherrill

Justin Sherrill — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 01:13:35 +0000

JohnCraft: removed the link. Too bad it didn’t work, but given that it’s hard to sell a BSD-specific hosting service in general, and hosting tends to be a race to the bottom in price, I’m not surprised.

By: Petr

Petr — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 00:23:11 +0000

Who uses DF? me and other 0.000000001% of nix users, out of that a tiny tini fraction would use a parallel port. I cannot fathom why anyone interested in DF would be installing it on a computer old enough to have to use a parallel port, certainly not for HAMMER or SMP. Situation would be different if DragonFly had a large scale commercial deployment dating back to 1990s.
If someone still uses parallel port, they are also likely using FBSD 4 or even 3.

By: Samuel J. Greear

Samuel J. Greear — Mon, 03 Jan 2011 18:11:52 +0000

EOC,

People still use parallel ports, they are quite common in some circles (just not modern desktops and servers), I see no reason it should be made optional yet. The problem with making things optional is once they are no longer compiled into a GENERIC kernel they are no longer well maintained with regards to changes in the rest of the kernel. They bit-rot.

Pretty much right with you on the rest.

By: JohnCraft

JohnCraft — Mon, 03 Jan 2011 11:25:03 +0000

Can you remove the entry for ‘Dragonflybsd VPS Hosting’ as the site says

DragonFly Hosting is closed

We did not gather enough interest to offset colocation costs.
Then we ran out of money. If you are interested in our serivce
or would like us to start again, drop an email to lifanov@this.domain
We’d love to hear from you!
—

John.

By: Edward O'Callaghan

Edward O'Callaghan — Mon, 03 Jan 2011 10:25:49 +0000

@petr,

I think the serial port stuff should maybe stay for the moment.

* The parallel port should be optional if not removed.
* Any old 10baseT NIC drivers should go also.
* The old PCMCIA stuff should be optional.
* Apple Talk should definitely go by now!
* MFS should be optional because everything is TEMPFS which is much better, I can’t see any point why they are both on by default.
* COMPAT43 should go also.

That’s my current wish list.
Regards,
Edward.

By: petr

petr — Mon, 03 Jan 2011 08:58:40 +0000

IMO everything that predades pentium 2 should go. Noone uses this legacy junk anymore.

By: Edward O'Callaghan

Edward O'Callaghan — Mon, 03 Jan 2011 04:04:59 +0000

Gooooooooooooood !!!!!!!!!

I love it when this junk goes.. Apple Talk next please… die die die :)

I guess this results in less exploitable code, shorter compile times, smaller kernel memory footprint and possibly less mutex contention.

Edward.