RFC: removing ndis(4)

[Daniel Ebdrup Jensen]

On Thu, Dec 03, 2020 at 06:43:37AM +0300, Vladimir Kondratyev wrote:
>On 03.12.2020 06:32, Adrian Chadd wrote:
>> On Wed, 2 Dec 2020 at 19:28, Vladimir Kondratyev <vladimir at kondratyev.su> wrote:
>>>
>>> On 03.12.2020 03:12, Brooks Davis wrote:
>>>> I'd like to propose that we remove the ndis(4) driver prior to FreeBSD
>>>> 13.  It was a clever idea in the early 2000's when the market was
>>>> flooded with 10/100 NICs with Windows-only drivers, but that hasn't been
>>>> the case for ages and the driver has had no meaningful maintenance in
>>>> ages[0].  I'd be a bit surprised if it worked at all today (it surely
>>>> won't work with modern Windows drivers).
>>>>
>>>> To try to examine the popularity of ndis, I checked dmesgd.nycbug.org
>>>> and there are 5 total entries with the most recent being 2007.
>>>>
>>>> The PC Card attachments are currently marked for deletion prior to
>>>> FreeBSD 13.
>>>>
>>>> Unless there is surprising outcry I plan to add (and MFC) deprecation
>>>> notices in about a week's time and remove the driver shortly thereafter.
>>>>
>>>> -- Brooks
>>>>
>>>> [0] I noticed today that part of the ndis 802.11 ioctl handler has been
>>>> broken since 2005.
>>>
>>> ndis(4) was functional at least in 2015 and at that time it was the only
>>> way to utilize BCM's wi-fi built in my "Asus EEEPC"
>>
>> Everything has moved onto new NDIS APIs that we don't support.
>>
>
>BCM4313 devices still have a Win-XP driver. No one tried to delete it
>all-over-the-internet.
>
>
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Yes, you can absolutely find old drivers - but Windows XP was using NDIS 5.1, 
and the specification has since moved on from 6.0 (with Vista) all the way to 
6.8x, with at least one major change that makes them incompatible.

Even the Extended Support for Point-of-Sale systems has expired, so unless 
you're proposing that FreeBSD support something for longer than the vendor that 
made it, and find someone who wants to step up to maintain it, I don't see how 
the project can realistically keep the code if nobody has been known to run it 
for at least half a decade?

Yours respectfully,
Daniel Ebdrup Jensen