Nice to know my arbitrary choice of a serial mouse over a bus mouse would have finally paid off, had I not lost the mouse to a fire in the early '90s.
Linux 7.1 Removes Drivers for Bus Mouse Support
61–69 of 69 posts
Re: Linux 7.1 Removes Drivers for Bus Mouse Support
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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. Hasn't windows (nt lineage) moved solidly in the opposite direction? Used to be you could reload/restart the video card ("GPU") driver if the driver crashed?
I think this conflates two different eras/layers. NT 4 famously moved the window manager/GDI/graphics subsystem into kernel mode, so that’s probably the “opposite direction” history. But modern GPU-driver recovery is WDDM/TDR, and it very much still exists: WDDM splits the display driver into user-mode and kernel-mode components, and TDR resets/recovers a hung GPU/driver instead of requiring a reboot. https://learn.m…
And I don't recall any practical way to recover from a crashed NT 3.x GUI subsystem.
It would presumably still function as a server, and be gracefully shut down remotely, but in the absence of anything like Remote Desktop or EMS[1], you'd be hard pressed to get much local troubleshooting done without rebooting the system anyway.
Also, as an NT user since 3.1, and a daily user of 3.5 and 3.51, I don't recall the GUI ever actually hanging or crashing (other than as a side effect of a bugcheck, which, by definition, is a crash triggered by code running in kernel mode).
That's one of the main reasons I was an early and enthusiastic NT user: while I can't say its performance was any better than "good enough", and then only on hardware that was at least comfortably above average in terms of CPU speed and RAM capacity, it was remarkably stable compared to every other PC OS I had used at the time.
Which, to be fair, would have been limited to MS-DOS, 16-bit Windows 2.x and 3.x, and OS/2 2.0 at the time, though it remained true throughout the lifespan of Windows 9x and OS/2 (at least through 3.0, the last version I used), and neither FreeBSD nor Linux were as reliable once you added at least a basic X11 environment to reach rough feature parity (and while X11 did allow recovery after crashing, insofar as it can be restarted without rebooting the system, it still took all your GUI applications and xterm windows down with it when it crashed).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergency_Management_Services
Re: Linux 7.1 Removes Drivers for Bus Mouse Support
#63If anyone is curious, here is the actual commit that removed the drivers: https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/lin...
What the hell. Kernel.org is mining in my browser to “make sure I’m not a bot”?
Preventing scrapers from grabbing every single commit and feeding it to train an AI. (Instead of just, you know, cloning the repo and using the clone to feed the AI).
Is this really the first time you've encountered the Anubis anti-scraper system? It's been everywhere the past few years, because so many of those scraper bots are incredibly lazily programmed. Many discussions here on HN have included people commenting on scraper bots hitting every single commit page, diff page, etc. on their self-hosted forges, burning up lots of CPU time and bandwidth to serve them what they could have just gotten by cloning the repo if the bot's programming was slightly more intelligent.
Re: Linux 7.1 Removes Drivers for Bus Mouse Support
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
What the hell. Kernel.org is mining in my browser to “make sure I’m not a bot”?
Preventing scrapers from grabbing every single commit and feeding it to train an AI. (Instead of just, you know, cloning the repo and using the clone to feed the AI). Is this really the first time you've encountered the Anubis anti-scraper system? It's been everywhere the past few years, because so many of those scraper bots are incredibly lazily programmed. Many discussions here on HN have included people commenting…
This is the first time I have encountered this, yes.
LLM training has really been a drain on the general internet :(
Re: Linux 7.1 Removes Drivers for Bus Mouse Support
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
There was at least one non-identical ISA slot: https://www.lo-tech.co.uk/wiki/IBM_Personal_Computer_XT_Syst... https://www.lo-tech.co.uk/understanding-pcxt-slot-8/
IBM was always special. :-) Aren't they the ones who invented the MCA bus abomination that required a floppy disk to configure each card?
You may want to read up on the history of dip switches, jumpers, and plug and play a little bit more.
Re: Linux 7.1 Removes Drivers for Bus Mouse Support
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
Preventing scrapers from grabbing every single commit and feeding it to train an AI. (Instead of just, you know, cloning the repo and using the clone to feed the AI). Is this really the first time you've encountered the Anubis anti-scraper system? It's been everywhere the past few years, because so many of those scraper bots are incredibly lazily programmed. Many discussions here on HN have included people commenting…
This is the first time I have encountered this, yes. LLM training has really been a drain on the general internet :(
It's been showing up on just about any code forge that isn't GitHub, so odds are good your browser has encountered it but you didn't notice the Anubis screen until now (it often goes by so quickly you'll miss it if you blink, though that depends on the site).
Re: Linux 7.1 Removes Drivers for Bus Mouse Support
#67Microkernels 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?
You can't do it with zero kernel code for ISA devices, but if there was a pci busmouse, uio + uio_pci_generic would work for reading the mouse, and you'd use uinput to send the events to the input stack. If you're willing to make a little uio stub driver for the interrupt, you can do it for ISA. UIO is from 2006 or something.
tldr; it's there but nobody is interested in reinventing ancient pre-PCI drivers, so there's no generic ISA plumbing.
Re: Linux 7.1 Removes Drivers for Bus Mouse Support
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I don't know how you'd confirm either way. A lot of stuff from the 80s is in landfill now because it's just old, even if not broken.
I'm sure we built a lot of badly made stuff then too, but my guess is with our tighter manufacturing tolerances, we can push things closer to breaking point, with our increased casting/molding tech, we make stuff smaller and more complex, so it breaks more, we also drive harder to profit margins (unsourced claim!) so cutting corners/quality is more acceptable/planned obsolescence/planned failure.
Re: Linux 7.1 Removes Drivers for Bus Mouse Support
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
ISA slots are all identical. If you have one slot, you can multiply it to 100 slots just by connecting the wires.
There was at least one non-identical ISA slot: https://www.lo-tech.co.uk/wiki/IBM_Personal_Computer_XT_Syst... https://www.lo-tech.co.uk/understanding-pcxt-slot-8/
I used to have a couple of IBM EduQuest machines. The majority of the ISA slots were wrong-handed.