Linux Drops ISDN Subsystem and Other Old Network Drivers (phoronix.com) 95
"Old code like amateur radio and NFC have long been a burden to core networking developers," reads the pull request.
And so Thursday Linus Torvald merged the pull request "to rid the Linux kernel of the old Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN) subsystem," reports Phoronix, "and various other old network drivers largely for PCMCIA era network adapters." This was the code suggested for removal given the recent influx of AI/LLM-generated bug reports against this dated code that likely has no active upstream users remaining... [W]ith the large language models and increased code fuzzing finding potential issues with these drivers for obsolete hardware, it's easier to just get rid of these drivers if no one is actively using the hardware from decades ago... This merge lightens the kernel by 138,161 lines of code with ISDN gone and numerous old network adapters and also getting rid of legacy ATM device drivers as well as the amateur ham radio support. The main networking drivers removed affect the 3com 3c509 / 3c515 / 3c574 / 3c589, AMD Lance, AMD NMCLAN, SMSC SMC9194 / SMC91C92, Fujitsu FMVJ18X, and 8390 AX88190 / Ultra / WD80X3.
Linux 7.1 also has removed the long-obsolete bus mouse support as well as beginning to phase out Intel 486 CPU support and removing support for Russia's Baikal CPUs.
And so Thursday Linus Torvald merged the pull request "to rid the Linux kernel of the old Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN) subsystem," reports Phoronix, "and various other old network drivers largely for PCMCIA era network adapters." This was the code suggested for removal given the recent influx of AI/LLM-generated bug reports against this dated code that likely has no active upstream users remaining... [W]ith the large language models and increased code fuzzing finding potential issues with these drivers for obsolete hardware, it's easier to just get rid of these drivers if no one is actively using the hardware from decades ago... This merge lightens the kernel by 138,161 lines of code with ISDN gone and numerous old network adapters and also getting rid of legacy ATM device drivers as well as the amateur ham radio support. The main networking drivers removed affect the 3com 3c509 / 3c515 / 3c574 / 3c589, AMD Lance, AMD NMCLAN, SMSC SMC9194 / SMC91C92, Fujitsu FMVJ18X, and 8390 AX88190 / Ultra / WD80X3.
Linux 7.1 also has removed the long-obsolete bus mouse support as well as beginning to phase out Intel 486 CPU support and removing support for Russia's Baikal CPUs.
The Windows 11ing of Linux (Score:2)
Re:The Windows 11ing of Linux (Score:4, Insightful)
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Would it work to run a older distro virtually? I'm not sure, though I suspect it wouldn't.
Re:The Windows 11ing of Linux (Score:5, Funny)
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Yes. Because GNOIME > 2 ruins everything.
Re: The Windows 11ing of Linux (Score:4, Informative)
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I mean it's only 7.1, not 7.0 it's being removed from. You could use ubuntu 2.04, at which point EOL would be some time around 2030, at which point it would become a little more difficult to run a 40 year old network card in a fully patched OS.
I mean that's ignoring the difficulties of trying to run an ISA card these days.
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I mean it's only 7.1, not 7.0 it's being removed from. You could use ubuntu 2.04, at which point EOL would be some time around 2030, at which point it would become a little more difficult to run a 40 year old network card in a fully patched OS.
I mean that's ignoring the difficulties of trying to run an ISA card these days.
Fortunately ISA bus support is a hard requirement for pATA IDE disks.
Also fortunate for GP, they won't notice any difference between their driver supported ISDN card that isn't plugged in to anything, and their soon to be unsupported ISDN card still not plugged in to anything.
You haven't been able to get ISDN or POTS service in the USA for almost a decade now.
Most other nations don't either.
Even the few nations in the EU that might still have ISDN service and an ISP to call with it, that would be moot as ol
Re: The Windows 11ing of Linux (Score:2)
This is untrue. You can still get POTS lines here in California. It costs a ton. In some areas, there is no cell service, and it is a lifeline. IDSL was still offered to me as an option until recently.
I do have cable, though, and capped my POTS wiring.
i
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Re: The Windows 11ing of Linux (Score:2)
It was just a typo. I didn't even see it. Vision issues.
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> instead of being used in retro computing environments
Would you want 7.x running on retro hardware? An environment like is is probably going to be setup in a 'classic' way and unlikely to be running bleeding edge.
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Now all these obsolete devices have to be landfilled instead of being used in retro computing environments. Everything is being trashed due to AI. I've also heard of many indie websites shutting down due to only getting views from scrapers.
You don't know wtf you're talking about. Why would these devices be upgrading to this kernel? And in the situation that they NEEDED to upgrade to this kernel, why wouldn't they just...compile a version of this kernel with the device drivers added back in?
Again, you don't know wtf you're talking about.
no one is using a 3c509 yea no don't believe that (Score:3, Informative)
this and the ne2000 were littlery the gold standard to get a isa based machine on a network.
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littlery
Man, you should get a prize for that one.
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Re:no one is using a 3c509 yea no don't believe th (Score:5, Funny)
Right. Not even 35 years old, the 3C509. I remember it like it were yesterday how we wrapped coax cable around that three-storey house with rented flats to get us four people connected. Probably need to go back to OS/2 if Linux drops support!
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Yeah, in 1995.
There's likely next to zero people who have a legitimate use case for running an NE2000 or 3c509 on a machine that is actually capable of running a modern Linux kernel.
Re:no one is using a 3c509 yea no don't believe th (Score:4, Interesting)
A real NE2000 or 3c509? Sure, probably not.
But an emulated one is extremely likely. Their ubiquitousness made them primary targets for cloning in both hardware and software, especially with virtualization. I have to say I'm pretty surprised they'd discontinue support for them on that basis alone.
And if the argument is "LOL old code! Code rot! genAI bug submissions overload!" then remember we're also talking about extremely simple devices by today's standards, with very little of the layered abstracted architectures used for, say, a USB to Ethernet adapter. A lot of these devices just need one grizzled old hacker to maintain them (as in the plural, one programmer, multiple legacy devices.)
I just don't see the justification for removing them.
Re:no one is using a 3c509 yea no don't believe th (Score:4, Insightful)
A lot of these devices just need one grizzled old hacker to maintain them (as in the plural, one programmer, multiple legacy devices.)
And are you?
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Alas I'm far too young, I'm only in my mid-fifties.
Re: no one is using a 3c509 yea no don't believe t (Score:2)
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A lot of these devices just need one grizzled old hacker to maintain them (as in the plural, one programmer, multiple legacy devices.)
A grizzled old hacker who actually needs these devices themselves. Otherwise your grizzled hacking skills are still better used elsewhere.
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then remember we're also talking about extremely simple devices by today's standards
Right in TFS they mention this change eliminated 140,000 lines of code. That's a comma there to denote thousands, not a decimal point. There's a question of the relevance of code rot here, but there's absolutely no question at all as to whether the implementation of this stuff is "simple".
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Actually I still have a couple of those, both the ISA and the later PCI versions. Hate to throw them out..
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this and the ne2000 were littlery the gold standard to get a isa based machine on a network.
You missed the context. No one is using this on a hyper modern OS running the latest and greatest kernel. SystemD doesn't even have a systemd-isad module.
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And the 21140 based PCI for 10/100 whose drivers were twitchy depending on the OEM.
But I remember those techs! (Score:5, Funny)
used this like 30 years ago (Score:1)
I remember using a isdn card on linux about 30 years ago. It was very useful at the time
. But not sure there is any network left that could use it nowadays....and if no users can test fixes, then it is better to remove these drivers
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I miss ISDN. Only 20 years ago, all Japanese payphones still had ISDN ports. I wrote software to handle downloading updates over ISDN while cooperating with point-of-sale systems that also needed to use the ISDN lines. All these moments will be lost in time like tears in rain.
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I must admit to being a little surprised but also suspecting my reason for surprise is wrong. ISDN was always essentially the core digital phone system exposed as much as possible to the subscriber. So it's always been relevant as long as we had a digital (uhm, direct digital might be a better term) phone system.
But I suspect almost all phone companies have switched to Voice-over-IP now. It's not even practical to get POTS phone service in this region, I know, we tried to get it for my elderly in-laws a few
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What about all the people around here (Seattle area) who lose POTS service every time a meth addict cuts down the phone cables for the copper?
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As was just mentioned, it's all digital now so that's not really happening unless the cable company is hanging those same wires off the poles. Then you'll have Internet and your landline will go down. Of course, I haven't had a landline in 20+ years. The only people I know that have one are legacy cable subscription bundles and even those folks have individual cellphones as well. Maybe someone in the mid to late 80s (do those count as boomers or silent generation?).
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As was just mentioned, it's all digital now
And some people think it's all daises and everyone gets a pony. They need to come out here and visit the real world. We still get news stories every few months showing copper-pair cables cut down a few hundred feet at a time by our local addicts.
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Last mile wires are likely running VDSL, not POTS or ISDN. Phone service runs through a modem which the user plugs into their house wiring to give the illusion of POTS, but outside the house it is just VoIP
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but outside the house it is just VoIP
Through a 100 pair cable.
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I built my house back in 2020. At least coming into the house it is just plain POTS. If there is a modem translating then it is somewhere out in the street.
Rural areas don't tend to get upgraded very often.
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> As was just mentioned, it's all digital now so that's not really happening unless the cable company is hanging those same wires off the poles.
No, my point is it's no longer direct digital (which is why I tried to draw a distinction in the comment, with the parenthesized comment, but I guess nobody understood it - but the thing is my entire comment doesn't make sense if you don't take into account the parenthesized comment, because I'm clearly drawing a distinction between digital and VoIP.)
So my guess
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My (older) sister is one of the last War Babies to be born, as she came into the world a bit more than a week before VE Day. And, I have a friend who claims to be one of the first legitimate War Babies having been born in November, '42. Both of them are in their 80s. And, our parents were both part of the Greatest Generation and my Father served in the US Army but never went overseas.
Nobody uses HAM-based packet radio? (Score:5, Interesting)
That surprises me. Obviously, if it's true it's true, but with satellite Internet availability decided by politics, and Internet traffic regularly monitored, I'd have thought some people in remote communities would prefer alternatives. I've been known to be wrong on occasion, and if this happens to be such an occasion, then ok. It just seems... odd that people desperate to be seen as independent and off the regular grid would deliberately not use technology that would permit them to communicate long-distance on a grid they themselves had control over.
Re: Nobody uses HAM-based packet radio? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: Nobody uses HAM-based packet radio? (Score:3)
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Well, packet radio is still used. You have things like APRS which broadcasts location for location tracking, you have things like winlink so you can send emails over amateur radio, and you even have packet radio BBSs. But, the last one is the only one that would really use that kernel code and it's very uncommon. There's no reason it shouldn't be all userspace utilities.
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Not that using the linux kernel drivers was easy, but at least the systems were reliable.
I think it could be a problem if a linux kernel is used on an embedded platform, maybe a Raspberry PI or similar ones, more than use them on a desktop system.
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Open Source is not, and never has been, about the money.
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Now, I *DO* have the knowledge to write and maintain Linux drivers - and have done so professionally.
I am willing to write code under an open source license for free - and have done that as well.
Anyone who claims "proficiency" in a language has missed the entire point of programming. You design software around a paradigm, the syntactic sugar is an irrelevancy. Which is why I can use something in the order of 20-25 languages with effective fluency and around 17 operating systems. Because I simply don't care
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Newbie.
Nobody "forces". Nobody "leeches". (Unless they're called Microsoft, IBM, Red Hat, Ubuntu...) But not because of any mystery - but because open source is about scratching itches. AND THERE IS NO OBLIGATION THAT THE ITCHES BE YOURS.
For f's sake, you're a bloody idiot if you honestly think that capitalist concepts of motivation are remotely interesting. Indeed, you should read the psychology paper on the FSF website and learn how people actually work.
I am perfectly happy to maintain the drivers, I don'
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Apparently nobody is using the Linux kernel's drivers for it, these days it's done purely in user-space with no need for kernel drivers.
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I guess it's the same for NFC. It's all USB devices, even the internal NFC readers.
Such a missed opportunity. So much more could be done with NFC.
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Right where it should be. In the past, it made sense because it was complex and the speeds high enough that userspace wasn't ideal. Plus many of the kernel interfaces didn't exist.
These days, ISDN and ax.25 are serial based protocols and best handled in userspace. If you want to shove it through TCP/IP, there are many kernel interfaces to do that now as well, and the speed
AX.25 gone? I, for one, am disappointed... (Score:1)
The writing's been on the wall for a long time, and I (and others) obviously didn't care enough to take over maintenance, only to whine about the lack of it, but I always thought that the native AX.25 support was a great selling point of Linux to hams. There are disadvantages to using it natively, esp. on mixed-use machines (You want to surf the web and have ham traffic in the same stack?) but it was fantastic for experimentation and for getting multiple apps to work together in classic Unix fashion where
No more ISDN? (Score:1)
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+1 Underrated; Isn't most of downtown Seattle still stuck on ISDN due to a combination of legal and logistical restrictions, or is that not the case anymore?
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I think you can still get support for it using external kernel module. It is just removed from the main kernel.
An argument for user space driver interfaces? (Score:2)
I feel like this wouldn't be a big issue (or at least one we're debating) if there were stable APIs for things like user space network card drivers. Mind you, I don't know how well that'd work with ISA devices.
Old Hardware (Score:1)
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Quit whining about this making old hardware useless.
Quit whining about people whining.
There was absolutely no reason for the modern Linux kernel to drag this code with it until the end of time.
Developing software is fundamentally an exercise in managing complexity. If code is dragging you it is because you have failed to do your job. Competent developers are able to design systems such that compatibility is maintained without impacting future development. People who whine about compatibility are incompetent.
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> I want my unicorn. Competent biologists should be able to do it.
"Why are there no unicorns?"
https://youtube.com/shorts/G1A... [youtube.com]
By the way, I recommend also "How to build your dragon (training sold separately)". As dragons are something we could make.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
I remember ISDN (Score:5, Funny)
When I worked in IT in the 90s, I struggled with SPIDs and provisioning
I even wrote a set of lyrics about it, set to the music of YMCA by the Village People
Phone man, oh my modem's too slow
I need answers, and I'm ready to go
What's the distance to my local CO
Am I close enough to get it
Phone man, oh I need it today
I can't wait for the fiber coming my way
It's one hundred and twenty eight K
And it's good enough
So get me
ISDN
You know I'm talkin' bout
ISDN
It's the best you can get
But the word on the street
Says it's already obsolete
ISDN....
Poorly summarised (Score:4, Insightful)
Old code like amateur radio and NFC
Is poorly stated as both are actively used. Yes amateur radio usage is well below it former peak usage as the motivation for using it has changed, but it is still popular with people who like to explore technology with the rise of SDRs driving interest. Likewise NFC is now has record use in daily life.
Instead of making it sound like support for amateur radio and NFC was being removed they should have said support for some long obsolete hardware was being removed.
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But that's not all they removed. This merge removed the entire ISDN subsystem, ATM networking, and AX.25 as well. This is layer 2 network protocol level support being removed from the kernel, far more than just some hardware drivers.
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ISDN: It Still Does Nothing (Score:2)
(a/k/a Innovation Subscribers Don't Need)
It still amazes me that, as late as the 1990's, and well after 56kbit modems were prolific, ISDN was being offered up by the ILECs as "broadband," at metered rates that made Ma Bell's long distance charges look like spare change.
Happily, it wasn't too long before ISDN was put out of everyone's misery when DSL showed up. And now, finally, after fifty years of pissing about, fiber is finally being pulled to the premises.
If you really need ongoing ISDN support, y
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ISDN was pretty popular outside the US. In Germany in particular, it was used for payment terminals at a large proportion of businesses. In Australia, it was the most cost-effective way to connect a small PABX to the phone network (you could get an ISDN connection with 10, 20 or 30 bearer channels, depending on how many simultaneous external calls you wanted to support). In Japan, payphones had ISDN sockets so you could plug in your laptop/palmtop/whatever and check your e-mail or connect to your office
Please spare 3c905 (Score:1)
I hope corrosive levels of delete happy mentality do not invade Linux Kernel development. It would suck to see Linux go in the direction of Wikipedia or LibreSSL.
Amateur Radio? (Score:2)
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The Linux kernel has/had the ability to create network interfaces for AX.25, NETROM (on top of AX.25) and other protocols besides IPv4/IPv6. Routing of said protocols also was supported.
You could use ethernet adapters, packet modems with KISS serial interfaces, a soundmodem driver, etc. Linux would manage the interfaces, and the same netstat/route/etc. commands you use manage other network connections worked with AX.25 as well.
But relatively few Amateur Radio programs ever offloaded this work to the Linux
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The Linux kernel has/had the ability to create network interfaces for AX.25, NETROM (on top of AX.25) and other protocols besides IPv4/IPv6. Routing of said protocols also was supported.
I'm not certain why this has to be implemented at kernel level. Not today.
So let's take this at a practical level. If you are familiar with Direwolf, the best software TNC, it will no longer work? That Serial communications are gone? Serial to USB dongles deprecated?
APRS programs like Xastir and any and all programs that use AX.25 will not function on any Linux using the 7.1 kernel?
I'm just responding to the article that says "Old code like amateur radio and NFC have long been a burden to core net
ISDN in the home (Score:2)
Did anyone else have ISDN in their home for a while? In my small town ma Bell was in no hurry to bring DSL to the masses. However, a few local gas stations had ISDN connections for whatever reasons. Knowing this I asked AT&T to install ISDN in my home, and they did, for free. For $70 a month I had 128K through two 64K bonded phone lines. I had that setup for almost three years until they decided to offer DSL in my area. I had a Motorola ISDN Bitsurfer modem that served me well the entire time.
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I have no idea why AT&T didn't charge me for the installation. The tech that came to my house to install it said mine was the first private house he had installed it in and was quite uncommon. It only costs a little more than what two phone lines would have cost at the time too. It was really cool to be able to be online, get a phone call, answer it, and still not lose Internet connection, but instead have the speed drop to 64K. When I hung the phone up the speed would rocket back to 128K. The only time
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Yeah, ISDN was the shit if all you had to work with were analog modems. I could rarely get my 56K modem to get connected at anything greater than 38.4K. A true 128K was amazing at the time.
Don't you DARE... (Score:2)
..Remove the amateur radio stuff. Believe me its still being used - A LOT.. I got off the Windows bandwagon nearly 15 years ago and have run various Linux distros since. Currently on KUbuntu 24.04, just waiting for the new 26.04 LTS to release and I'll upgrade my machines.
I suspect there's not too many still on an ISDN connection, what with cable and fiber connections everywhere.
73 Dave K7DGF