DEQNA support in stable ???! Errrr.....

[Rick Macklem]

Warner Losh wrote:
>On Sun, Mar 4, 2018 at 3:45 PM, Pete French <petefrench at ingresso.co.uk>
>wrote:
>>
>> Unless my memory fails me DEQNA is the Dec Q-bus network adapter
>> for MicroVaxen isn't it ? The mini version of the DEUNA interface for
>> the full size Vax/11 machines. Now, I woudn't be surprised to see this
>> in netBSD, but kind of surprised to see it in FreeBSD! Anyone care to
>> enlighten me ?
>>
>
>FreeBSD has never had support for DEQNA. The if_deqna was added by me when
>I wrote devd as a ridiculous, never to clash with anything example. First,
>it is 'qe' in other BSDs. Second, FreeBSD will never run on VAXen. It was
>mostly a joke. 
As the original author of the if_qe.c driver for the Qbus DEQNA, I can honestly
state that that hardware was a joke. It was a pig to program and didn't follow
its own published spec. My driver allowed CSRG to convince DEC to give them
their driver from Ultrix, but it wasn't much better.
(When I retired a few years ago, I still had a MicroVAXII sitting under my desk,
 mostly as a joke. It was sooo sllooowwww, but it would still boot some variant
 of 4BSD.)

rick