Re: [PATCH] drivers: pcmcia: remove obsolete host controller drivers

[Dominik Brodowski]

Am Mon, Mar 09, 2026 at 12:41:48AM -0700 schrieb Ethan Nelson-Moore:
> PCMCIA is almost completely obsolete (the last computers supporting it
> natively were from ~2009), and the general consensus [1] seems to be
> that support for it should be gradually removed from the kernel.
> 
> In 2023, an initial step of removing all the PCMCIA char drivers was
> taken in commit 9b12f050c76f ("char: pcmcia: remove all the drivers"),
> and that has not been reverted, so it seems logical to continue this
> process by removing more low-hanging fruit.
> 
> These host controller drivers have had no meaningful changes since
> their status was discussed in 2022 [2], and are unlikely to have any
> remaining users. Remove them and a couple references to them
> in comments.
> 
> The i82365 and tcic drivers are for ISA-attached host controllers,
> which are even less likely to be used nowadays than ones on other buses.
> 
> The i82092 driver has almost certainly not been used in over 20 years.
> It was broken by a null pointer dereference since the dawn of Git
> history (2.6.12-rc2 in 2005) until someone fixed it in 2021 in commit
> e39cdacf2f66 ("pcmcia: i82092: fix a null pointer dereference bug").
> From their dmesg log [3], it is clear they were testing in an emulated
> environment and not on real hardware.
> 
> i82365.h is used by drivers other than i82365 and is therefore retained.
> 
> [1] https://lore.kernel.org/all/c5b39544-a4fb-4796-a046-0b9be9853787@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx/
> [2] https://lore.kernel.org/all/Y07d7rMvd5++85BJ@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx/
> [3] https://lore.kernel.org/all/1624345891-4215-1-git-send-email-zheyuma97@xxxxxxxxx/
> 
> Signed-off-by: Ethan Nelson-Moore <enelsonmoore@xxxxxxxxx>

Applied to pcmcia-next.

Thanks,
	Dominik