Addition through subtraction
reddit / freebsd

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edthesmokebeard · 2021-12-11 13:36

It was with mixed emotions I saw that FreeBSD 13 removed the drivers
for the NE2000 NIC (and other old ISA brethren).  A fundamental piece
of early PC / Internet history, consigned to the dustbin.

That said, its refreshing to see FreeBSD cull out the old cruft
instead of leaving it around.

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[deleted] · 2021-12-11 16:52

The truth is, FreeBSD is not NetBSD.

NetBSD is very big on ancient hardware, your old Compaq, Power Mac,
Amiga, you name it. That's why NetBSD supports old hardware FreeBSD
removed support for long ago, and why NetBSD supports many
architectures that are long out of production.

FreeBSD in comparison supports "mainstream" hardware, meaning your new
ThinkPad, 3 year old HP ProLiant, maybe your 10 year old Dell Inspiron
or Mac Mini, but not your 25 year old Gateway Solo or Macintosh
Quadra.

It is sad to see old hardware lose support, but then if you really
need it, you can fork FreeBSD and include the NE2000 drivers, or can
use an older ISO. Open source projects aren't there to maintain every
old driver or software if they don't want to (we've seen how bloated
and insecure Windows has become after maintaining decades of legacy
cruft).

Yes, I could run FreeBSD 13 on a Pentium III Dell Optiplex desktop,
that with an onboard 3com NIC. But it may not work forever either.

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[deleted] · 2021-12-11 16:54

[deleted]

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[deleted] · 2021-12-11 16:56

[deleted]

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foodown · 2021-12-11 17:33

Almost no system with an NE2K or even ISA clone will have the 64MB of
RAM or >1GB of disk to run FreeBSD 13, so this seems wise.

I have an old AMD 386DX 40 MHz with an ISA NE2K, and its other low
numbers left it in the dust of FreeBSD long ago. I guess there are
some 486 machines out there w/ ISA buses that might could still do
freebs 13, but that seems too small a group to worry about.