Looking for bfe(4) (Broadcom BCM4401) users -- considering deprecation
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Date: Tue, 20 Jun 2023 21:15:57 UTC
I have added a note to the bfe driver's man page stating that it is unmaintained and is a candidate for removal in the future, as it supports nearly-obsolete hardware, has some known issues (bugs open for years) and no evidence that anyone is going to fix those issues. The bfe driver was not removed in Brooks' previous cleanup of old 10/100 drivers (see https://github.com/freebsd/fcp/blob/master/fcp-0101.md) as it was sufficiently popular. NYC*BUG's dmesg shows a submission with bfe0 from 2020-12-25, and I don't want to remove it if it's being used. That said, I also don't want us to claim to support this hardware if the driver is unstable. So, I would like to know if you have bfe(4) in any systems running FreeBSD (and if so how well it works for you). There may be an interest in revisiting other 10/100 drivers for FreeBSD 15.0 but right now I am interested specifically in bfe.