Re: Proposal to remove Token Ring support

[Jason Thorpe <thorpej%me.com@localhost>]

> On Jan 13, 2020, at 9:43 PM, Chris Hanson <cmhanson%eschatologist.net@localhost> wrote:
> 
> On Jan 13, 2020, at 9:31 PM, Jason Thorpe <thorpej%me.com@localhost> wrote:
>> 
>> I am proposing that we remove support for Token Ring. 
> 
> (Please forgive me for not being that structurally familiar with NetBSD.)
> 
> Would someone who wanted Token Ring support be able to grab these files from the latest tree still containing them, compile them outside the kernel as a set of loadable modules, and use them that way? (Possibly with some forward porting work if kernel APIs change, of course.)

Honestly, if an interested party wanted to step forward and maintain this code, there wouldn't be much danger in it being pulled from the tree.  The problem, of course, is that even if it's a loadable module (which it could be made so, in theory), someone would still have to do the work to keep up with kernel networking changes...

There has recently been some significant progress in MP scalability work post-NetBSD-9, and I expect that work will continue ... finishing making the network stack MP-safe is a big item on the TODO list (it already works with some drivers), and these legacy networking systems will need to adapt to keep up.

-- thorpej