Linux 7.1 Removes Some Obsolete PCMCIA Drivers That Likely Haven't Been Used In Years
In addition to some network drivers on the chopping block due to AI bug reports for obsolete hardware/drivers and Linux 7.1 dropping various drivers for Russia's Baikal CPUs, the Linux 7.1 kernel as of today also dropped some obsolete PCMCIA host controller drivers.
For years there have been efforts to remove obsolete PCMCIA WiFi cards, PCMCIA to USB drivers, and other steps to phase out obsolete PCMCIA card support. For Linux 7.1, it's a few obsolete host controller drivers being removed that are likely unused by anyone running a modern, upstream Linux kernel and the drivers themselves are not maintained. Some of these drivers have been broken in the past for years at a time.
Ethan Nelson-Moore took to removing the I82092, I82365, and TCIC drivers. The I82092 was for an Intel PCI-to-PCMCIA bridge device found in some ancient laptops and evaluation boards, the I82365 for an ISA-bus PCMCIA host bridge for even older hardware, and then the Databook TCIC family of PCMCIA host bridges.
Ethan argued in the patch removing these PCMCIA host controller drivers:
With today's PCMCIA merge to Linux 7.1, the drivers are removed. In doing so the Linux 7.1 kernel is now lighter by 3,169 lines of code.
For years there have been efforts to remove obsolete PCMCIA WiFi cards, PCMCIA to USB drivers, and other steps to phase out obsolete PCMCIA card support. For Linux 7.1, it's a few obsolete host controller drivers being removed that are likely unused by anyone running a modern, upstream Linux kernel and the drivers themselves are not maintained. Some of these drivers have been broken in the past for years at a time.
Ethan Nelson-Moore took to removing the I82092, I82365, and TCIC drivers. The I82092 was for an Intel PCI-to-PCMCIA bridge device found in some ancient laptops and evaluation boards, the I82365 for an ISA-bus PCMCIA host bridge for even older hardware, and then the Databook TCIC family of PCMCIA host bridges.
Ethan argued in the patch removing these PCMCIA host controller drivers:
"PCMCIA is almost completely obsolete (the last computers supporting it natively were from ~2009), and the general consensus seems to be that support for it should be gradually removed from the kernel.
In 2023, an initial step of removing all the PCMCIA char drivers was taken in commit 9b12f050c76f ("char: pcmcia: remove all the drivers"), and that has not been reverted, so it seems logical to continue this process by removing more low-hanging fruit.
These host controller drivers have had no meaningful changes since their status was discussed in 2022, and are unlikely to have any
remaining users. Remove them and a couple references to them in comments.
The i82365 and tcic drivers are for ISA-attached host controllers, which are even less likely to be used nowadays than ones on other buses.
The i82092 driver has almost certainly not been used in over 20 years. It was broken by a null pointer dereference since the dawn of Git history (2.6.12-rc2 in 2005) until someone fixed it in 2021 in commit e39cdacf2f66 ("pcmcia: i82092: fix a null pointer dereference bug"). From their dmesg log, it is clear they were testing in an emulated environment and not on real hardware."
With today's PCMCIA merge to Linux 7.1, the drivers are removed. In doing so the Linux 7.1 kernel is now lighter by 3,169 lines of code.