User Plea Means EISA Support Not Removed From Linux

jones_supa writes A patch was proposed to the Linux Kernel Mailing List to drop support for the old EISA bus. However a user chimed in: "Well, I'd like to keep my x86 box up and alive, to support EISA FDDI equipment I maintain if nothing else — which in particular means the current head version of Linux, not some ancient branch." Linus Torvalds was friendly about the case: "So if we actually have a user, and it works, then no, we're not removing EISA support. It's not like it hurts us or is in some way fundamentally broken, like the old i386 code was (i386 kernel page fault semantics really were broken, and the lack of some instructions made it more painful to maintain than needed — not like EISA at all, which is just a pure add-on on the side)." In addition to Intel 80386, recent years have also seen MCA bus support being removed from the kernel. Linux generally strives to keep support even for crusty hardware if there provably is still user(s) of the particular gear.

Comments

Re:Crusty Hardware

[ArcadeMan]

On the other hand, this is some hella stark contrast to certain other OS makers, who go out of their way to dump support for something as soon as they can in order to keep you on that upgrade treadmill - even if it means being forced to buy new hardware.

You're talking about IBM's OS/2, right?

Sent from my PowerPC Mac mini which cannot run Yosemite.

Re:Crusty Hardware

[morgauxo]

I loved being able to set the IRQs and memory addresses. Ok, not really but the for the first decade or so I HATED plug and play, or plug and pray as we called it in my office. Half the time it didn't work! It would try to put things right on top of one another. When possible I would disable it and just use the jumpers. Once you got used to it it wasn't THAT hard and it was great knowing that your soundcard was on IRQ X and your video on IRQY and never the two would conflict. Early plug and play seemed to randomly decide to reshuffle things and the next time you boot it may not still work.

That was of course a long time ago and things work well on any reasonable hardware today. But.. I still cringe when people complain about setting IRQs. It's not hard to move a jumper and its not that complicated of a concept to know that to things probably shouldn't try to use the same resource. Not being able to set those things caused me far far more frustration than having to set them ever did! Even though things are great now I'm not entirely sure that decade of pain was worth it to get here.

In the real world, installed base 'just works".

[DutchUncle]

It is obvious that nobody would install a brand new system with such old technology. It should be equally obvious, though, that just as one expects old buildings to "just stay up" (with a little maintenance), there are plenty of old technology systems still up and running just fine for whatever they do. Lots of people in big cities have 75-year-old telephone wiring which works fine for what it always did (though it can't handle DSL), and the same thing will happen to the brandy-newest fiber optic cable when someone comes up with an LED laser frequency that needs a different glass with different chromatic aberration. There are lots of industrial and scientific devices out there that never got updated drivers past (whatever release of whatever system), and they cost a lot of money at the time, and they still work. (Though I admit that, while they may be worth maintaining, at some point one has to give up on trying to update them.)

Re:Crusty Hardware

[qubezz]

This is also completely Microsoft's fault. In Vista they decided to kiss the ass of big media companies in order to play Blu-Ray content, which required encrypted end-to-end data transport, mandating the rewriting of the driver stack for everything from video and sound cards to imaging devices and audio mixing. They should have just given them the finger.

What Microsoft didn't have to do was just completely discard gameport support. Microsoft blatantly removed the code to support 15 pin gameports from the OS. In Vista 32 bit, it could be partially put back by driver hacks of old dlls, but that hack was made impossible in win7. You could literally buy joysticks at the same CompUSA that would not work on the Vista shitboxes they were selling.

Re:What about ISA?

[gweihir]

You can also get them easily on industrial PCs. One reason is that there are quite a few custom interface cards based on ISA around, as it is so easy to interface with it. The other thing is that there are cards around that have quite a bit of remaining lifetime and would be expensive and problematic on software-side to replace adequately.

For example, PC104 is ISA with a different connector and it is far from dead.