Messages in this thread |  | | Date | Sun, 06 Jan 2013 22:30:01 -0600 | From | Robert Hancock <> | Subject | Re: [PATCH] block: delete super ancient PC-XT driver for 1980's hardware |
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On 01/04/2013 07:27 PM, Paul Gortmaker wrote: > This driver was for the 8 bit ISA cards that were installed in > the PC-XT machines of 1980 vintage. They supported the dual > ribbon cable MFM drives of 10-20MB capacity, and ran at a 3:1 > interleave, giving performance on the order of 128kB/s. > > By the introduction of the PC-AT (286) these controllers were > already scrapped in favour of 16 bit controllers with some onboard > RAM that could support a 1:1 interleave. > > The git history doesn't show any evidence of runtime fixes that > would reflect active usage; instead just the usual tree-wide API > type changes/cleanups. Going back to in-source changelogs, the > last "runtime" fix that is evident is something I did over a > dozen years ago[1] -- and even back then, the hardware was long > since unavailable, so that ancient fix was also not runtime tested. > > The time is long overdue for this to get flushed, so lets get > rid of it before anyone wastes more time doing builds and sparse > checks etc. on long since dead code.
Although this hardware is obviously long obsolete, it's conceivable that someone could still drag out an old MFM/RLL controller and run it on a non-completely-ancient PC with ISA slots in order to recover data from an old drive or something. Given that the code doesn't have wide-ranging effects beyond a couple of files, I'd lean towards keeping it unless there's some reason to believe it's hopelessly broken.
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