Re: Do we need this junk?

On Thu, Apr 05, 2007 at 12:56:35PM -0500, Nikolas Britton wrote:
> On 4/5/07, Dag-Erling Smørgrav <des_at_des.no> wrote:
> >"Nikolas Britton" <nikolas.britton_at_gmail.com> writes:
> >> Can anything in the list below be removed from CURRENT?
> >
> >No.  Modern i386 and amd64 still have an ISA bus, and devices
> >connected to that bus, even if they don't have ISA slots.
> >
> 
> What you speak of is the LPC bus. LPC is intended to be a
> motherboard-only bus. No connector is defined, and no LPC peripheral
> daughterboards are available.

LPC is more or less ISA, just reduced to the features the vendors need
onboard.
So you still need ISA logic for your realtime clock, your PS/2
keyboard, etc...
Old doesn't mean useless - PC104, which basicly ISA with different
header, are still sold for a good reason.
Lot of people with special hardware are still required to run those
equipment, because it is not easily replaceable.
E.g. blind people still have the requirement to use real ISA cards
for their braile equipment, which is quite expensive and not to be
wasted easily.

> So I come back to the question of why we have external devices from
> 1987 still floating around in the kernel and more importantly why
> these devices are enabled by default in the GENERIC kern conf?

Because people with such hardware need it more than those with
fast hardware, for which it won't hurt to recompile a kernel or
just live with a few unused bytes - an unused meg won't hurt on a
1G box.

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