linux-kernel - Re: [RFC/PATCH 0/5] Delete microchannel [CONFIG

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Message-ID: <1337275472.30498.38.camel@dabdike.int.hansenpartnership.com>
Date:	Thu, 17 May 2012 17:24:33 +0000
From:	James Bottomley <jbottomley@...allels.com>
To:	Paul Gortmaker <paul.gortmaker@...driver.com>
CC:	"linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org" <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>,
	"Andrew Morton" <akpm@...ux-foundation.org>,
	Linus Torvalds <torvalds@...ux-foundation.org>
Subject: Re: [RFC/PATCH 0/5] Delete microchannel [CONFIG_MCA] support

On Thu, 2012-05-17 at 12:40 -0400, Paul Gortmaker wrote:
> It was good that we could support MCA machines back in the day, but
> realistically, nobody is using them anymore.  They were limited to
> 386-sx 16MHz CPU and some 486 class machines and never more than 64MB
> of RAM.

This is complete rubbish.  The MCA machines go up to 686 class with up
to 4GB of memory (admittedly, this is with the NCR MCA extensions).

>   Even the enthusiast hobbyist community seems to have dried up
> close to ten years ago, based on what you can find searching various
> websites dedicated to the relatively short lived hardware.

Well, it's used in obsolete systems, yes.  It wasn't really that short
lived, since it did penetrate quite widely for a while before EISA and
eventually PCI took over.

> So lets remove the support relating to CONFIG_MCA.  There is no point
> carrying this forward, wasting cycles doing routine maintenance on it;
> wasting allyesconfig build time on validating it, wasting I/O on
> git grep'ping over it, and so on.

So what actual problems has it had that are causing these issues.  I'm
still listed as MCA maintainer and I haven't seen any.  As far as I
thought, it was nice and cleanly separated and builds just fine for me.

James