Still using ISA cards? A few more drivers removed

2012/12/042012/12/02 by Justin Sherrill

Still using ISA cards? A few more drivers removed

The stl(4), bt(4), aic(4), and cy(4) drivers are now PCI–only, which means no COMPAT_OLDISA kernel option, and a time to upgrade your hardware if you’re actually using these devices. Does anyone even still have ISA slots?

3 Replies to “Still using ISA cards? A few more drivers removed”

Anonymous says:

2012/12/05 at 11:13

I always wonder *why* they would remove ISA drivers.
Do they require extensive work to keep up to date with new releases?

I have a sizeable collection of old computers. Some of which still have ISA cards.
I can always run older versions of an operating system that does still have the drivers, but still…
Edward O'Callaghan says:

2012/12/06 at 04:03

At last!
Samuel J. Greear says:

2012/12/11 at 22:57

Anonymous, the answer is in short, “yes”. Code does not exist in a vacuum, it requires maintenance to keep pace with the rest of the kernel. The ISA stuff has been on the chopping block for a long time. It basically boils down to this, if we are pretty sure nobody is using it and nobody ever will use it, we will wait another year or two — and then remove it. If we end up being wrong, we can certainly bring code back (so feel free to yell if something you actually need has been removed), but we can’t just keep everything around because someone might want to maybe use it someday, it increases the maintenance burden and often presents obstacles to “modernizing” various subsystems.

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