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

[John Paul Adrian Glaubitz]

Hi Andrew,

On Tue, 2026-04-21 at 14:31 -0500, Andrew Lunn 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.

They might still be used for retro-computing on various non-x86 computers
such as Alphas, older SPARC systems, PA-RISC and 68000 systems. Please don't
assume that every computer is just an x86 computer.

As for the AI-generated bug reports, I assume this will settle down sooner
or later when reporters realize not every issue is being addressed. Anyone
who is still using this old hardware won't be using them on machines directly
connected to the internet.

So, why bother? Just ignore those bug reports.

Adrian

-- 
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