Re: [PATCH net 00/18] Remove a number of ISA and PCMCIA Ethernet drivers

[Daniel Palmer]

Hi Andrew,

On Wed, 22 Apr 2026 at 04:32, Andrew Lunn <andrew@xxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> These old drivers have not been much of a Maintenance burden until
> recently. Now there are more newbies using AI and fuzzers finding
> issues, resulting in more work for Maintainers. Fixing these old
> drivers make little sense, if it is not clear they have users.
>
> These are all ISA and PCMCIA Ethernet devices, mostly from the last
> century, a couple from 2001 or 2002. It seems unlikely they are still
> used. However, remove them one patch at a time so they can be brought
> back if somebody still has the hardware, runs modern kernels and wants
> to take up the roll of driver Maintainer.
>
> Signed-off-by: Andrew Lunn <andrew@xxxxxxx>

I replied to the single patches for the ones I think I have off the
top of my head but maybe I have a few other these.
I think on x86 people running machines that have real ISA slots and a
modern kernel are going to be fairly rare but I think there is non-x86
hardware that has some of these and people are still using them.
I think the pcnet one is used in some PC emulators too?

This is just my opinion but I think it'd be good to give people a bit
more time before they get removed. I thought I was the only person
using the 68000 (a cpu from 1979) code in the m68k tree for years
until out of the blue a month or so ago someone popped up and asked if
I could fix a bug in it since I'd fixed a different bug in it
recently.

Maybe we could add a special thing in the maintainers for "this is
code only crazy people use" and have a rule to ignore untested AI
generated patches for it? :)

Thanks,

Daniel