netdev - Re: [PATCH net-next v2] net: ethernet: pcnet32: remove VLB support

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Message-ID: <20260203145729.5c491d71@kernel.org>
Date: Tue, 3 Feb 2026 14:57:29 -0800
From: Jakub Kicinski <kuba@...nel.org>
To: Ethan Nelson-Moore <enelsonmoore@...il.com>
Cc: netdev@...r.kernel.org, Don Fry <pcnet32@...ntier.com>, Andrew Lunn
 <andrew+netdev@...n.ch>, "David S. Miller" <davem@...emloft.net>, Eric
 Dumazet <edumazet@...gle.com>, Paolo Abeni <pabeni@...hat.com>
Subject: Re: [PATCH net-next v2] net: ethernet: pcnet32: remove VLB support

On Mon, 2 Feb 2026 21:32:13 -0800 Ethan Nelson-Moore wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 2, 2026 at 6:20 PM Jakub Kicinski <kuba@...nel.org> wrote:
> > On Fri, 30 Jan 2026 17:21:19 -0800 Ethan Nelson-Moore wrote:
> > Unless the maintainers acks this I think we should just wait until
> > we can delete this driver completely. Unless this unblocks removal
> > of some VLB-related APIs (which I wasn't able to spot..)  
> 
> I don't think that's going to happen anytime soon, given what people
> have said about its uses.
> 
> FYI, as of 6.19-rc8, the driver works with KVM's emulated device
> (Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] 79C97x [PCnet32 LANCE] [1022:2000]
> (rev 10)), well enough that web browsing works fine and it can
> download at several MB per second (multiple large files at once). It
> has random short stalls (of a half second or less), but that could be
> due to QEMU emulation issues.

IMHO we should probably start deleting the "QEMU emulation uses this"
toys, too. virtio existed for long enough. 

But let's wait for 7.x with that, we deleted a bunch of drivers in 
the past few weeks. Let's see how many of those we need to revert
and whether any lessons need to be applied to next removals :)