1. 22 Jan, 2013 3 commits
    • Paul Gortmaker's avatar
      drivers/net: delete old 8bit ISA 3c501 driver. · de8270ff
      Paul Gortmaker authored
      It was amusing that linux was able to make use of this 1980's
      technology on machines long past its intended lifespan, but
      it probably should go now.
      
      To set some context, the 3c501 was designed in the 1980's to be
      used on 8088 PC-XT 8bit ISA machines.  It was built using a large
      number of discrete TTL components and truly looks like a relic
      of the ancient past before large scale integration was common.
      
      But from a functional point of view, the real issue, as stated
      in the (also obsolete) Ethernet-HowTo, is that "...the 3c501 can
      only do one thing at a time -- while you are removing one packet
      from the single-packet buffer it cannot receive another packet,
      nor can it receive a packet while loading a transmit packet."
      
      You know things are not good when the Kconfig help text suggests
      you make a cron job doing a ping every minute.
      
      Hardware that old and crippled is simply not going to be used by
      anyone in a time where 10 year old 100Mbit PCI cards (that are
      still functional) are largely give-away items.
      
      Cc: Alan Cox <alan@linux.intel.com>
      Signed-off-by: default avatarPaul Gortmaker <paul.gortmaker@windriver.com>
      de8270ff
    • Paul Gortmaker's avatar
      drivers/net: delete intel 486 panther onboard ethernet support · 5205939d
      Paul Gortmaker authored
      This driver was specific to a "professional workstation" line
      of products from around 1993 that used the i82596 ethernet chip
      as an on-board ethernet solution.
      
      With a 486 processor, and the premium top of the line model maxing
      out at a clock speed of 50MHz, we can safely retire this support.
      Signed-off-by: default avatarPaul Gortmaker <paul.gortmaker@windriver.com>
      5205939d
    • Paul Gortmaker's avatar
      drivers/net: delete 486 Apricot support · 6e07ba3e
      Paul Gortmaker authored
      The Apricot was a 486 PC with 4MB RAM, and an on-board ethernet
      via an intel i82596 hard-wired to i/o 0x300.
      
      Those who were using linux in the 1990's will recall that the
      i82596 driver was not one of the more stable or widely used
      drivers of its day.  Combine that with the extremely limited
      resources of the platform, and it is truly time to expire the
      support for this thing.
      
      There are some old m68k targets who were also using this chip,
      so rather than poll the m68k user base, we simply cut out the
      x86/Apricot support here in this commit.
      Signed-off-by: default avatarPaul Gortmaker <paul.gortmaker@windriver.com>
      6e07ba3e
  2. 21 Jan, 2013 37 commits