FCP-0101: Deprecating most 10/100 Ethernet drivers

[Ian Lepore]

On Thu, 2018-10-04 at 10:21 -0600, Warner Losh wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 4, 2018 at 10:15 AM Michelle Sullivan <michelle at sorbs.net>
> wrote:
> 
> > 
> > tech-lists wrote:
> > > 
> > > 
> > > I'm astonished you're considering removing rl given how common it is.
> > > 
> > I'll second that comment - though no disrespect to Brooks.  Brooks as
> > far as I can see is just the messenger.
> > 
> Absent good data, one has to make one's best guesses. I guessed wrong here
> in my comments to Brooks about which ones were must keeps. I knew it was
> popular back in the day (~2000), but had thought it's popularity had waned
> much more than it apparently has. I last deployed systems with rl in them
> around 2007, and at the time it was trailing edge gear (the SBCs we used at
> Timing Solutions tended to use popular, but ~5-year-old technology because
> that market segment wanted longevity of spare availability...).
> 
> Warner

11 years later, we (Timing Solutions, now a division of Microchip) are
still using SBCs with rl(4) hardware and still shipping software
updates with that driver built into the kernel. We build systems with a
lifespan in the field of 20 years or more, and the stability and
compatibility across OS upgrades over that kind of span is a BIG reason
to use freebsd rather than linux for such things.

-- Ian