Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

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.

20 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 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.

      --
      Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
    3. 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.

      --
      Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
    4. 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.

    5. 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.
    6. 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.

    7. 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?
    8. Re:Crusty Hardware by Iniamyen · · Score: 3, Funny

      Aren't they running Frodo?

    9. 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!

    10. 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.
    11. 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.

      --
      Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
    12. 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.

  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. 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?

  4. 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...

  5. 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.)

  6. 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.