Linux 7.0 Retires The IBM Mwave ACP Modem Driver Used By Some 1990s ThinkPads
Long past due for retirement, the Linux 7.0 kernel has removed the obsolete Mwave driver for the 3780i ACP Modem found in some Pentium II era IBM ThinkPads from the 1990s.
The Mwave Linux driver was for the 3780i ACP Modem found in some ThinkPads. Found on the likes of the IBM ThinkPad 600E, 600, and 770 these modems allowed 56K connectivity. IBM wrote the Mwave kernel driver and the associated user-space software for it back in the 1990s.
The hardware is woefully outdated and anyone that may still happen to have one of these Pentium II ThinkPad relics is almost surely not still connecting to the Internet on it with this modem. If anyone is, the patch removing the driver notes that these laptops have an RS-232 port where you could attach an external modem instead. More than 2.6k lines of old driver code now removed.
The Mwave driver removal was part of the char/misc pull request that also included IIO driver updates, GPIB updates, i3c driver updates, improvements to the Binder C and Rust drivers, and various other updates.
The Mwave Linux driver was for the 3780i ACP Modem found in some ThinkPads. Found on the likes of the IBM ThinkPad 600E, 600, and 770 these modems allowed 56K connectivity. IBM wrote the Mwave kernel driver and the associated user-space software for it back in the 1990s.
👁 ThinkPad 600E, from ThinkWiki
The hardware is woefully outdated and anyone that may still happen to have one of these Pentium II ThinkPad relics is almost surely not still connecting to the Internet on it with this modem. If anyone is, the patch removing the driver notes that these laptops have an RS-232 port where you could attach an external modem instead. More than 2.6k lines of old driver code now removed.
The Mwave driver removal was part of the char/misc pull request that also included IIO driver updates, GPIB updates, i3c driver updates, improvements to the Binder C and Rust drivers, and various other updates.