Re: Removing ARCNET stuffs

Radoslaw Kujawa <[email protected]> wrote:
>> On 28 May 2015, at 10:30, Ryota Ozaki <[email protected]> wrote:
>> 
>> On Thu, May 28, 2015 at 3:58 PM, Frank Wille <[email protected]> wrote:
>>> On Thu, 28 May 2015 11:57:11 +0900
>>> Ryota Ozaki <[email protected]> wrote:
>>> 
>>>>> As far as I can see Arcnet is only used by the Amiga bah(4) driver.
>>>>> Isn't it possible to keep it somehow, as an MP-safe network stack would
>>>>> be irrelevant for the Amiga platform?
>>>> 
>>>> We could keep it with some pain, but we cannot keep it working if there is
>>>> really no user. (I'm not sure if it works or not even now.) Is it still
>>>> worthwhile?
>>> 
>>> I will not insist in keeping it when there is pain to do so. And you may
>>> be right that there is no user, but this is valid for a lot of platforms
>>> and drivers.
>>> 
>>> 
>>>> Anyway I don't proceed this attempt ignoring your request.
>>>> I wish there were actual users though...
>>> 
>>> Maybe we can wait for a few days to give more potential users the chance
>>> to read these messages on the port-amiga list?
>> 
>> Sure. I was a bit eager.
>> 
>>> 
>>> In the meantime I will talk with other Amiga users if anybody owns such
>>> a board. Probably is@ still got one, as he was working on the driver many
>>> years ago.
>> 
>> Thanks!
>> 
>>> 
>>> When nothing happens and nobody is able to test it, we can remove the code.
>> 
>> Okay, I'm waiting more.

>There are companies still making PCI Express ARCnet interface cards,
>hubs and converter devices:
>http://www.ccontrols.com/arccontrol/nims.htm
>
>I'm not entirely sure that removing support for a standard that is
>still actually used out in the world is a good idea. Maybe it is not
>used much with NetBSD, since we only have amiga-specific driver. One
>more downside, is that anything ARCnet related is rather expensive now
>(around $400 for a single new PCI interface card).

The same arguments might be made against the plan to remove ATM
support.

>I wish I had more free time... fixing ARCnet and implementing support
>for newer interface cards seems like an interesting project.

>Support for several legacy protocols was removed in recent years. I
>fear that our networking stack is becoming more and more IP and
>Ethernet centric.

It isn't as bad as the Linux stack yet but I would also like to see a
variety of protocols in the tree. Even if they don't always work I
have found it useful to be able to look at other ways of doing stuff.

I have been doing a bit of work on cleaning up some old Chaosnet and
CAN code recently.

Robert Swindells