HEAD UP: non-MPSAFE network drivers to be disabled (was: 8.0 network stack MPsafety goals (fwd))

[Ade Lovett]

On May 25, 2008, at 02:58 , Robert Watson wrote:
> While I'd be quite supportive of something along these lines, I  
> think it probably is more work to port SLIP to userspace than to  
> hack the current code a little bit to be MPSAFE, assuming it remains  
> supported with the revised tty code.  SLIP is a fairly straight- 
> forward piece of code, as long as you don't try to understand the  
> line discipline stuff. :-)

Given that this is (a) 2008 and (b) 8.x we're talking about, are there  
really that many consumers of SLIP to warrant it being carried forward  
at all?

Seems to me that it would not be unreasonable to give a heads up that  
the current kernel-space ppp/slip (and, for that matter, plip) drivers  
are going away some time before 8.0-RELEASE, pppd is more than  
adequately replaced by userland-ppp or netgraph, and if there's some  
critical need by someone to have SLIP and/or PLIP, then they'll need  
to step up to the plate to do the necessary re-implementation.

Or stick with 7.x, which would be unaffected by this.

We have a lot of network drivers that are potentially up for axing  
with the move to MPSAFE.  Why not push just a little harder and slice  
out some serious legacy code?

It's all well and good to be able to say that the current release of  
the kernel supports hardware that hasn't been used, other than in  
idiosyncratic situations (yes, ahc(4), I'm looking at you) for 5+  
years, but it seems that we have an opportunity here to break out the  
Danish Ax[tm] in anger, and do some heavy-duty culling before 8.0-REL.

-aDe