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Linux 7.1 Removes Drivers for Bus Mouse Support

phoronix.com

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Re: Linux 7.1 Removes Drivers for Bus Mouse Support

#41

Post by kstrauser »

kube-system wrote: post #19
bastawhiz wrote: post #4

This is the kind of spring cleaning I crave. Deleting busted drivers that haven't worked in over a decade? Fantastic! Some of this hardware likely has exactly zero users because the material it's made from can't possibly have survived. Look at the cord on the mouse in the photo: you might be able to plug it in, but I wouldn't bet money signal can still make it down the wire.

The mouse in the photo was made somewhere between 1987-1993. I have computers older than that which work just fine.

Same, but I didn't spend a lot of time putting my grubby hands on those computers.

Re: Linux 7.1 Removes Drivers for Bus Mouse Support

#42

Post by sockaddr »

bigfishrunning wrote: post #33
shevy-java wrote: post #22

This makes me sad. Now, most will say "but why, 1995 is ancient history, no such hardware exists anymore". The thing is ... should Linux get rid of what is old? I understand you have a smaller kernel when you have less code, less cost to maintain, I get it. Still, I wonder whether this should be the only allowed opinion. Would it not be better to, kind of, transition into a situation where any hardware built in the f…

> Would it not be better to, kind of, transition into a situation where any hardware built in the future, would be supported? easier said then done -- the kernel's internal interfaces aren't static, they change often. The project has never committed to stabilizing it's driver api, so every driver takes non-zero work to maintain. I would assume computers that are still running these old ISA mouses (mice?) probably are…

To add to this, as long as the diff representing the removal of the driver is kept in the git history it would be trivial for someone in the far future to say to an AI agent:

"Please take this linux source and patch the Bus mouse driver back in but match the new driver interface".

With code preserved in git history it's never actually "removed". It's just, disconnected.

Re: Linux 7.1 Removes Drivers for Bus Mouse Support

#43

Post by wang_li »

shevy-java wrote: post #22

This makes me sad. Now, most will say "but why, 1995 is ancient history, no such hardware exists anymore". The thing is ... should Linux get rid of what is old? I understand you have a smaller kernel when you have less code, less cost to maintain, I get it. Still, I wonder whether this should be the only allowed opinion. Would it not be better to, kind of, transition into a situation where any hardware built in the f…

The real issue is that they don't have stable intra-kernel ABI/APIs. It should entirely be the case that technologies that are 10+ years old are stable and a clean abstraction layer can be created. You maintain the abstraction layer and all the things on the other side of it don't have to track random kernel changes. Things like this just keep working indefinitely.

Re: Linux 7.1 Removes Drivers for Bus Mouse Support

#44

Post by bitwize »

M95D wrote: post #13
cestith wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are still ISA slots in new systems with fairly modern processors and plenty of RAM, if you don’t mind buying specific models of industrial PCs for way too much money. For $1100 or so you, too, could have a 4th generation Core i3 machine. https://www.rampcsystems.com/product/2-isa-slot Or maybe you need 4 PCI and 9 ISA for some reason. DuroPC’s got you, if you can drop $1800 on a system with the same generation…

ISA slots are all identical. If you have one slot, you can multiply it to 100 slots just by connecting the wires.

This is what the word "bus" used to mean on a hardware level: a backplane of connections to which multiple peripherals could be attached. These days a bus is a LAN of point-to-point serial connections which, it turns out, is much more viable at the high communication rates demanded of modern hardware.

Re: Linux 7.1 Removes Drivers for Bus Mouse Support

#45

Post by stackghost »

M95D wrote: post #36
stackghost wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty sure the host will run out of IRQs long before 100. Don't most systems only have 16?

You don't really need IRQs for most ISA boards. OPL3/Adlib sound cards don't need one, MIDI doesn't, joystick port doesn't. I saw various I/O boards that don't need IRQ. Soundblaster does, but I don't know for what purpose. Maybe someone here can explain?

Sound Blasters and compatible cards used IRQ lines because back in the bad old days CPUs were slow, bandwidth was tiny, and buffers were minuscule.

To get responsive/real time audio the card needs to signal to the CPU, not the other way around, and at the time IRQs were the way to do that on ISA busses.

I would imagine that ISA cards that didn't need IRQs either required CPU polling or DMA.

Re: Linux 7.1 Removes Drivers for Bus Mouse Support

#46

Post by CodeWriter23 »

midtake wrote: post #37

Is this due to Mythos and other LLMs finding a bunch of obscure bugs or simply a precaution? If someone (a normie not a gentooman) wanted to run Linux on retro hardware how would they do it? Boot Debian Sarge?

The old-fashioned way, build your own kernel with the driver included.

Re: Linux 7.1 Removes Drivers for Bus Mouse Support

#47

Post by tialaramex »

M95D wrote: post #40
tialaramex wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In original ISA none of this is managed, the owner of the PC is expected to manually configure both hardware and software appropriately. So e.g. [with the PC turned off!] you move a tiny jumper (basically just a piece of conductive metal with a plastic housing) to the "IRQ 8" position and you pick "IRQ 8" in some menu or set it in an environment variable in DOS or whatever. By the time PCI is starting to appear there…

It can't be IRQ 8 on an ISA board. That's the IRQ for the RTC.

That's correct. I considered whether I should dig out a manual and decided that I should do the exact opposite and pick a value I know won't exist for ISA.

Re: Linux 7.1 Removes Drivers for Bus Mouse Support

#48

Post by dpark »

trollbridge wrote: post #8
bastawhiz wrote: post #4

This is the kind of spring cleaning I crave. Deleting busted drivers that haven't worked in over a decade? Fantastic! Some of this hardware likely has exactly zero users because the material it's made from can't possibly have survived. Look at the cord on the mouse in the photo: you might be able to plug it in, but I wouldn't bet money signal can still make it down the wire.

My bus mouse still works just fine; things built in the 80s tended to be pretty solid. However, it would be hard pressed to find a machine with ISA slots with enough resources to run Linux 7.1 acceptably.

> things built in the 80s tended to be pretty solid

Survivorship bias. We built a lot of crap stuff in the 80s, too. Most stuff built in the 80s is probably in landfills now.

Re: Linux 7.1 Removes Drivers for Bus Mouse Support

#50

Post by xiphias2 »

augusto-moura wrote: post #14
xiphias2 wrote: post #7

Microkernels have lost the open kernel wars because of their speed problems, but this is a great example of a driver that should have been running in userspace a long time ago, just like how Windows has been moving in that direction. Isn't Linux planning to do the same?

I guess things are going into that direction naturally, but not officially. eBPF is helping with getting deep kernel aspects into userspace. And there's some ressurgence of out-of-tree graphics drivers, specially for gaming. I believe userspace drivers are much more powerful and easy to build than 10 years ago, but it is not from a requirement from the kernel. Who knows, maybe we will get a smaller (instead of bigger…

Luckily I'm not a kernel maintainer, but it seems like they don't have 10-20 years to make hard practical decisions. It's easy to get rid of old unmaintained drivers, but they have to solidify interfaces much more as it is getting exponentially easier to find and use bugs or any unspecified part of the kernel for attacking it.

There was a very interesting point when people who were creating Rust interfaces were asking hard questions about ownerships and lifetimes in driver interfaces from the C linux maintainers and they didn't really care to answer (just wanted to wish Rust away).

Now with AI these questions are getting practical. Fortunately big companies have big stake in keeping linux secure, so I'm not worried about it being addressed at least.

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