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obsolete code must die

DISCUSSION David Luyer 1 participant 1 message Jun 14, 2001 1 message not in the archive

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Obsolete code must die. Hardware support must live on.

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ISA, MCA, EISA device drivers
If support for the buses is gone, there's no point in supporting devices for these buses.

I am not certain if tis is a good idea, for the reason given above. (Not certain about MCA and EISA though.)

MCA is common for PS/2's, which are still around.

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MFM/RLL/XT/ESDI hard drive support
Does anyone still *have* an RLL drive that works? At the very least get rid of the old driver (eg CONFIG_BLK_DEV_HD_ONLY, CONFIG_BLK_DEV_HD_IDE, CONFIG_BLK_DEV_XD, CONFIG_BLK_DEV_PS2)

I am not certain how much this stuff is still used outside the US. The XT driver still being around does surprise me though. (Will that even *work* on modern hardware? I didn't think you could get that card to work on a 386.)

Could never get my OMTI 8627 ESDI controller to work under Linux when I tried. It works under DOS/Win, Xenix and VSTa though. These controllers were pseudo-common early 386 machines (before the 386sx and 386dx) built for Xenix.

Surprisingly the old NEC ESDI drive still spins up, when most of the 1998 or 1999 Seagates/IBM drives are dead or dying and we've had close to an entire A1000 Sun disk unit fail to spin up -- the 'top-end' disks of today rarely seem to last more than 2-3 years (in that if you turn them off after 2-3 years of continual service and turn them back on 1/2 hr later, half of the drives which haven't spat out a drive head in the interim years will fail to spin up).

Even old Eagle drives from 1988 still spin up... given you have to flick the starter switch to spin them up half a dozen times, but they still work... seems they don't make disk drives like they used to.

David.

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