The OpenBSD maintainers are heroes for keeping hardware like this running. This is about the time Greg KH might say "yeah, there are like five of these left, zero in actual production, and the code to support them is gumming up the LLMs. I'm just going to take it out of the kernel."
Very True, and one thing people forget, we need to keep the ability to read these old devices. I was a operator (now admin) on a few minis in the early 80s that had these drives. The drive pack on the ones we had were removable and we used 256MB packs. We would backup data from one drive to another on third shift, at the same time to reel tapes. The reel tapes back then where used for long term backup off site, the d…
In 100 years, if we need to run kernel 6.12 to use a 3c509, is that all that bad? It's not like being "stuck" on an old IRIX without the proprietary dev CD where you have a catch 22 problem.
An old system version that's completely open is whatever the sysadmin version of "turning complete".
Sure, port the open system to the hardware that does not have an open system. But I question the value of keeping it up to date.
All else being equal, sure it'd be cool. But all else is not equal. So yes, ripping out old code is the right move for Linux, in my opinion.