• Linus Torvalds's avatar
    Merge branch 'delete-mca' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/paulg/linux · d5b4bb4d
    Linus Torvalds authored
    Pull the MCA deletion branch from Paul Gortmaker:
     "It was good that we could support MCA machines back in the day, but
      realistically, nobody is using them anymore.  They were mostly limited
      to 386-sx 16MHz CPU and some 486 class machines and never more than
      64MB of RAM.  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.
    
      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."
    
    Let's see if anybody screams.  It generally has compiled, and James
    Bottomley pointed out that there was a MCA extension from NCR that
    allowed for up to 4GB of memory and PPro-class machines.  So in *theory*
    there may be users out there.
    
    But even James (technically listed as a maintainer) doesn't actually
    have a system, and while Alan Cox claims to have a machine in his cellar
    that he offered to anybody who wants to take it off his hands, he didn't
    argue for keeping MCA support either.
    
    So we could bring it back.  But somebody had better speak up and talk
    about how they have actually been using said MCA hardware with modern
    kernels for us to do that.  And David already took the patch to delete
    all the networking driver code (commit a5e371f6: "drivers/net:
    delete all code/drivers depending on CONFIG_MCA").
    
    * 'delete-mca' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/paulg/linux:
      MCA: delete all remaining traces of microchannel bus support.
      scsi: delete the MCA specific drivers and driver code
      serial: delete the MCA specific 8250 support.
      arm: remove ability to select CONFIG_MCA
    d5b4bb4d
nmi.c 13.4 KB