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User Plea Means EISA Support Not Removed From Linux

Posted by timothy on from the otherwise-the-city-will-be-destroyed dept.

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.

38 of 189 comments (clear)

  1. Crusty Hardware by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I find it hard to believe that anyone is using EISA still. It got almost no traction in desktops and the only systems that ever had EISA slots were 386-486 era servers before the VL-BUS and PCI bus started to gain traction in late 486's.

    If someone actually has a working EISA system, I'd like to see a photo. I had never managed to see more than one of these systems in my lifetime, and only saw one because it was being replaced in 1997 by a Pentium desktop.

    I've actually seen more MCA systems than I've ever seen EISA.

    1. Re:Crusty Hardware by Penguinisto · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I'm surprised to see someone still using it myself (I've seen a few of them in the distant past, though...)

      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.

      --
      Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
    2. Re:Crusty Hardware by Carewolf · · Score: 2

      I find it hard to believe that anyone is using EISA still. It got almost no traction in desktops and the only systems that ever had EISA slots were 386-486 era servers before the VL-BUS and PCI bus started to gain traction in late 486's.

      If someone actually has a working EISA system, I'd like to see a photo. I had never managed to see more than one of these systems in my lifetime, and only saw one because it was being replaced in 1997 by a Pentium desktop.

      I've actually seen more MCA systems than I've ever seen EISA.

      EISA was parallel with VL-BUS for a long time, where consumer hardware used VL-BUS and enterprise or server hardware used EISA. PCI replaced both that wasn't until the mid 1990s. Still 20 years ago though.

    3. Re:Crusty Hardware by ArcadeMan · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

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    4. Re:Crusty Hardware by ArcadeMan · · Score: 5, Funny

      I've seen a firm where they still use a Tolkien Ring. It's their most prized possession.

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    5. Re:Crusty Hardware by MadKeithV · · Score: 5, Funny

      I've seen a firm where they still use a Tolkien Ring. It's their most prized possession.

      I'm sure you meant to say their most precious possession.

    6. Re:Crusty Hardware by hughbar · · Score: 2

      This way, sanity lies too, the resource cost of manufacturing new PC is enormous: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G... so doing it just to put money in the pockets of Microsoft, Apple etc. is an aberration.

      I recently changed my desktop but it was about 10 years old and I've given it to a recycling company. I've been able to do that because I'm a Linux user, it would have worked for BSD etc. too.

      --
      On y va, qui mal y pense!
    7. Re:Crusty Hardware by HBI · · Score: 4, Informative

      AC, the Compaq Deskpro line implemented EISA. While these systems rarely saw use in homes, banks were full of the things as were other firms. Deskpros were built like tanks up until about 1996. I installed lots of EISA NICs, in particular.

      My point is that there were more of these systems out there than you think.

      --
      HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
    8. Re:Crusty Hardware by BitZtream · · Score: 2

      So basically you want Apple and Microsoft to keep supporting your crusty old hardware with new features that it doesn't support anyway?

      Both Apple and Microsoft provide 'support' longer than pretty much any other software maker on the planet, including any Linux vendor you can name.

      Get a clue fanboy.

      --
      Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
    9. Re:Crusty Hardware by HBI · · Score: 2

      Bad form (replying to myself) but, I imagine many readers weren't even out of diapers when the last EISA system shipped. EISA slots supported ISA cards as well - the slots were dual use and had special keyed connectors that reached down lower in the slot when operating in 32-bit EISA mode. To an 8 or 16 bit ISA card, the slots were standard ISA slots for all intents and purposes, except that you had to run the EISA config utility (kind of like a BIOS config, but software rather than firmware) to get the system on board with what you were doing.

      --
      HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
    10. Re:Crusty Hardware by morgauxo · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.

    11. Re:Crusty Hardware by Penguinisto · · Score: 5, Insightful

      So basically you want Apple and Microsoft to keep supporting your crusty old hardware with new features that it doesn't support anyway?

      You're approaching it from the hobbyist/end-user viewpoint - turn in your geek card, please. The corporate/enterprise side of things will actually keep hardware around a whole hell of a lot longer, and industrial use cases keep old crap around the longest of all.

      Example? No problem, I got a ton of those, including this little gem I dealt with a couple of years ago: Company spent millions on a certain specialized (solar cell) wafering machine whose computer still uses a parallel port (remember those?)/ It's a year or two out from ROI when it breaks down, but the manufacturer won't update or repair anything w/o the company spending millions on a new machine. Why? Because they stopped issuing patches/drivers for the machine long ago when Microsoft decided to drop their OS support, and the old stuff won't support USB enough to allow for a USB/Parport adapter.

      This has fuck-all to do with fanboy ideology, and everything with having to keep systems up in situations where they need to.

      --
      Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
    12. Re:Crusty Hardware by Iniamyen · · Score: 3, Funny

      Aren't they running Frodo?

    13. Re:Crusty Hardware by morgauxo · · Score: 5, Insightful

      What the fuck are you talking about?

      I've watched my parents throw away perfectly good printer/scanner combos that were only a few years old because there were no drivers beyond XP.

      I have dozens of network and video adapters on a shelf in my garage that work great in Linux but have no Windows drivers beyond XP.

      Until recently even a 386 could run Linux!

      Linux vendor? I wouldn't know. I've never used one. I can install my own software thank you!

    14. Re:Crusty Hardware by freeze128 · · Score: 2

      The EISA spec is a lot like the color implementation of NTSC video. It was something that was added on top of ISA so that it would work just fine with OLDER ISA-only cards. The EISA setup programs of the time were especially clunky. This was just before the widespread use of flashable BIOS ROMS on the motherboard, so there was a system partition on the hard drive that contained the program (think of a rudimentary EFI EPS partition) and the settings. One of the major features was that hardware settings for add-in cards could be configured via this setup partition rather than via jumpers or dipswitches.

      When was the last time you set a jumper or dipswitch on your motherboard or add-in card?

    15. Re:Crusty Hardware by armanox · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Apple and Microsoft are far behind in terms of support from what I see.

      SGI IRIX 6.5: 1998-2014
      Solaris 10: 2005-2021
      Solaris 11: 2011-2024
      If I want long term support, I know I'm not going for a Windows systems or a Linux box. Know where to go for it (I'm sure that IBM and HP have some long lifecycles too....but I'm less versed in AIX, i, HP-UX, and OpenVMS)

      --
      I'm starting to think GNU is the problem with "GNU/Linux" these days.
    16. Re:Crusty Hardware by JackieBrown · · Score: 2

      I think what he's saying is that linux manages to retain support for these while Windows 7,8,8.1 needs active vendor support to keep it working

    17. Re:Crusty Hardware by ArcadeMan · · Score: 3, Informative

      Things like scanners and printers shouldn't require special drivers in 2015. When we plug a keyboard or mouse into our computers, it just works because they're standard devices with standard drivers.

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    18. Re:Crusty Hardware by qubezz · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.

    19. Re:Crusty Hardware by phantomfive · · Score: 2

      Exactly. There is no reason to replace hardware that works when the newer product will cost money and perform no better (and could even perform worse).

      --
      "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
    20. Re:Crusty Hardware by maestroX · · Score: 2

      parallel still available, http://www.newegg.com/Product/... or try ebay.

  2. The end of an era. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    "Linus Torvalds was friendly about the case"

    They did it, they neutered him.

    1. Re:The end of an era. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      "Linus Torvalds was friendly about the case"

      They did it, they neutered him.

      Torvalds is in general very reasonable. It's just when people push him with unreasonable requests that he bites back hard.
      Like when that guy wanted the kernel to be ported to C++ for no other reason than object orientation being the fad of the year.
      That was hilarious.

    2. Re:The end of an era. by Penguinisto · · Score: 5, Insightful

      They did it, they neutered him.

      Bullshit. He's harsh on coders who fuck up (and rightfully so), but I have never seen him unleash the Kraken on any reasonable user request.

      --
      Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
  3. Re:Overhead? by CimmerianX · · Score: 2

    Well that's the point. He's basically saying "It's no skin of our backs" to keep it supported, so he does.

    I think that's kinda awesome where 1 guy says he still need it supported and it stays.

  4. Re:Which is fair by ArcadeMan · · Score: 2

    By a strange coincidence “None at all” is exactly how much suspicion the ape-descendant Arthur Dent had that one of his closest friends was not descended from an ape, but was, in fact, from a small planet somewhere in the vicinity of Betelgeuse. Arthur Dent's failure to suspect this reflects the care with which his friend blended himself into human society - after a fairly shaky start. When he first arrived fifteen years ago, the minimal research he had done had suggested to him that the name ‘Ford Prefect' would be nicely inconspicuous. He will enter our story in thirty-five seconds and say “Hello, Arthur.” The ape-descendant will greet him in return, but in deference to a million years of evolution, he will not attempt to pick fleas off him; Earthmen are not proud of their ancestors and never invite them round to dinner.

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  5. Re:What a cheap fucker by ArcadeMan · · Score: 2

    How much time is spent maintaining this 20 year old code?

    None at all.

    "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." - Linus Torvalds

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  6. Old hardware / technology never dies,... by rstanley · · Score: 5, Insightful

    It just gets renewed, reused, and recycled, not only in more wealthy Western countries, and Third World countries, but by poorer people all over the world. (Hopefully with Linux and other FLOSS software installed!) There was an article in Slashdot in 2013 about an IBM 402 with punch cards, still in use!!! (I wonder if it could run Linux?) ;^)

    But seriously, even though most of us are using computer less than 5 years old, a lot of old computers are still in use. What about 16 bit embedded systems, many running Linux! I have to agree with Linus, if the old technology in the kernel, does not adversely affect newer technologies, and people are still using it, then there is a legitimate reason for leaving it in the kernel. I trust his opinion.

    IMHO, I think the FLOSS community has an obligation to continue to support older hardware & technologies that certain other proprietary O/S manufactures have long ago abandoned. Isn't that one of the reasons the Free Software and Open Source Software communities, and software were created in the first place?

  7. Re:What a cheap fucker by geert · · Score: 5, Informative

    Because he's the maintainer.

    http://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/tree/MAINTAINERS#n2998

    DEFXX FDDI NETWORK DRIVER
    M: "Maciej W. Rozycki"
    S: Maintained
    F: drivers/net/fddi/defxx.*

    He's supposed to run the latest kernel, and keep this driver working...

  8. In the real world, installed base 'just works". by DutchUncle · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.)

  9. What about ISA? by morgauxo · · Score: 2

    I was assuming that EISA was just a special case inside of the same code as ISA and that what was proposed was to remove all ISA support. Is that what was going to happen?

    ISA is old but I am sure there is quite a bit more than just one person out there with some sort of legacy hardware using it. I have a little bit of ISA hardware myself that I would like to use but not quite enough to build up a legacy PC. Every now and then I search the internet for ISA to USB adapters. There actually IS one company selling such a beast but it is way to expensive to be worthwile for me. But.. if I had some expensive piece of lab equipment or something like that with a proprietary ISA adapter... it would make sense.

    1. Re:What about ISA? by drinkypoo · · Score: 2

      I was assuming that EISA was just a special case inside of the same code as ISA and that what was proposed was to remove all ISA support. Is that what was going to happen?

      I doubt it. ISA buses are still present even in some modern hardware, even when they're not exposed. It's less common these days than it used to be, but it's not over.

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
    2. Re:What about ISA? by gweihir · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

      --
      Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
  10. Re: What a cheap fucker by Shimbo · · Score: 2

    Maybe, but I would hazard a guess that where this old tech is being used at all is likely to be in a resource poor environment.

    Alternatively, one with long term support requirements and onerous change control: e.g. military, nuclear, medical.

  11. Re:EISA? by ledow · · Score: 2

    Get off our lawn.

  12. Re:MCA removal by myrrdyn · · Score: 2

    Just for reference, Linus' reply to that:
    "Maybe we could some day remove EISA support too.."
    https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/5/1...

    --
    Elen sìla lùmenn' omentielvo
  13. Thank you, Linus! by MagickalMyst · · Score: 2

    It's nice to see that Linux is still being developed by the people, for the people.

    --
    Political correctness is really just herd psychology pushed by insecure people who desperately seek social conformity.
  14. parallel still available by Blaskowicz · · Score: 2

    You have many motherboards options with latest gen hardware and a parallel port, still.
    That may work if your software is so backwards it needs to think the parallel port is attached to the ISA bus.

    http://www.asrock.com/mb/Intel...
    http://www.asrock.com/mb/AMD/A...
    http://www.asrock.com/mb/Intel...