DISTORTED Linux kernel dev reality: DELETING PERFECTLY WORKING "vintage" WiFi, PCMCIA drivers & more

29 thoughts on “DISTORTED Linux kernel dev reality: DELETING PERFECTLY WORKING "vintage" WiFi, PCMCIA drivers & more”

• Once upon a time, in the old days, in a galaxy far, far away, those who implemented and fixed things where the heros. Not the haters who just tear it down and just delete it.

• After fedora update Bluetooth broke

• If you rely on these drivers become their maintainer. Be the person responsible for those drivers.

• Not even 24hours since this video was published and there's new article on Phoronix that they'll be dropping support for DEC Alpha EV5 in Linux 6.10, which is supposed to be broken anyway.

• I wonder if they delete it because they don't have the hardware to confirm it works. Or, tin foil hat time, there weren't many backdoors in vintage tech, so they don't want you using it with current updates.

• RE: Drivers removed from Kernel TREE ['https://youtu.be/yjb8MCrlzKw?feature=shared'%5D

• I disagree:
  1. as René says, it works now but if they start changing the internal driver interfaces someone will have to update those drivers and more importantly TEST them. How can they test it if almost nobody has the (1997-era!) hardware anymore.
  2. To the people complaining it's affecting them: are you a Linux kernel dev? No? Then how about you become one? Submit a patch reverting the change and say you've got the hardware to test. This applies to you René as well – don't just rant about how "Linux devs are stupid" in your own little bubble. Send a patch!

• I agree with you, maybe create a package that has the drivers instead of having it in the kernel

• They promise to delete one kilobyte for every megabyte they add! lol.

• WTF?! Linux foundation spends only 2% of its budget on the kernel? That is insane

• Only "cost" I can see for removing this is compile time and having to see stuff for old code fly by as they compile the kernel, and then wonder "Hmmm I could shave off a little bit of compile time by stripping out this old stuff"
  I am not hit by this… yet, although I do have an old 32 Bit AMD Sempron CPU that needs a new Linux install that handles 32 bit and PCMCIA for it's capture card.
  I haven't used it in a long while, but it does serve a purpose…

  As for real machines, Red Hat did scare me away from them when they stripped the LSI SAS stuff, I am a BIG user of these SAS cards and I worry for when they leave the Linux kernel as they are holding up my entire storage system.
  These cards are also plenty fast enough to run even large modern brand new harddrives you get today… Long live LSI SAS 2008!

• Can we create a movement to reject symbol rename patches… if that's actually an issue?

• I don't get why old stuff that only 5 people use should stay in the main kernel, sorry. For that we should have a legacy kernel or something like that.

• honestly I don't necessarily disagree with removing old drivers from the current kernel source, it's sad but not necessarily the end of the world. They should at least be put into a deprecated drivers source archive so someone could bring it back if they need to.

• this is why we cant have nice things.

• There is a discussion on linuxmint about how to return to gtk3 from gtk4

• Maybe checkout NetBSD?

• while i understand you rene, i think the thing is pretty simple. there are no people willing to maintain the code anymore. if you want the code then sign up as a maintainer for pcmcia and all the other older stuff. then it wouldnt get deleted.

  i understand why you want the code to stay but this is very niche. how many people will run an old powerbook that cannot even play youtube videos anymore because the graphicschip cannot decode h264 and the cpu is too slow?

  i still use an old netbook a samsung n510 with atom cpu, two gbyte ram and nvidia ion LE chip. you cant even watch 480p youtube on that thing anymore and more than two tabs will crash the system, even with xfce. i only use it for reading ebooks anymore.

• I guess that breaks WiFi for my Zaurus too. Rene, if you want to create a Linux fork to revert these insane deletions etc, I'll try to contribute.

• Well… I am very disappointed. People put hundreds or thousands of man hours into these drivers and they just deleted it. I never understand why people delete stuff if they don't even need to touch it. I also don't get it why are so many people freaking out when they see "unmaintained" written somewhere. There is a youtuber that made a whole video about uninstalling and finding an alternative to "neofetch" because it has JUST BECAME "unmaintained" (archived).
  And the spending of Linux Foundation is just… I have no words.
  But didn't Linus say "If you want to use old hardware, you should use old software"?

• It's sad to see all the big Linux influences say "it's old no one uses it anymore it's fine" even though doesn't touch anything else and had a ton of work put into it… If the linux kernel can't maintain support for old hardware then that is an issue with the linux kernel. They need to make an API that allows these old drivers to remain there without affecting the ease of supporting new hardware. That is their responsibility to do that. Rather than being lazy and gutting the hard work people put in for years

• It all started with the 'good riddance ' farewell to i386 expressed by Linus. Idiots thought that it's open season to code removal ever since

• As a young person (24) I massively sympathize with all the work that was put into these open source drivers. I fear the day where we are no longer able to run our old hardware and we simply have to keep paying companies for new stuff. Which is less stable and dies quicker. I thought the open source community was meant to support such efforts to maintain old hardware… It's too bad the Linux Kernel devs seem to have lost their way in this respect

• I like your rant! 😀
  This year I wanted to finally make the push to switch to Linux. So I'm watching and reading about Linux more and more. I wanted to be prepared.
  First I was very hyped, but I got a bit disheartened after a while. I'm a newbie obviously, but I was disappointed by the reactions of many people in the Linux community when the xz-hack was found out. Very uncritical about the process, that lead to a near disaster, and I don't talk about the maintainer, but the people from Red Hat that used it without looking into it.
  Is Linux like Boeing? Sometimes a door or an escape slide falls of but the rest of the time it's ok? 😀

  Does the phrase "We do not break user space" include also hardware or only software? Serious question, I heard that multiple times in Linus Torvald interviews.

  Cheers!

• you made my day with this

• Quite a few years ago I was trying to install on an old server and wondered why no disks were detected, the kernel module for SCSI controller had been dropped. Found the relevant patch, reverted it, made some minor tweaks and all working again. How long until they remove ISA sound card drivers and such?

• very based rené

• Linux kernel and distros have turned to shit. systemd, removing architectures, removing APIs, removing drivers, removing NFSv2, bloated kernel, bloated libs and apps. It's really sad corporate and bad programming/resource usage has taken over

• The core issue is that Linux doesn't have a stable driver interface, necessitating all drivers to exist in-tree.

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