Linux 7.1 Removes Drivers for Bus Mouse Support

There are still ISA slots in new systems with fairly modern processors and plenty of RAM, if you don’t mind buying specific models of industrial PCs for way too much money.

For $1100 or so you, too, could have a 4th generation Core i3 machine. https://www.rampcsystems.com/product/2-isa-slot

Or maybe you need 4 PCI and 9 ISA for some reason. DuroPC’s got you, if you can drop $1800 on a system with the same generation of processor. https://duropc.com/product/r810-4p9i-4

> things built in the 80s tended to be pretty solid

Survivorship bias. We built a lot of crap stuff in the 80s, too. Most stuff built in the 80s is probably in landfills now.

Most things.

Plastics and rubbers tend to not survive well a lot of the time just because of the chemistry. There's really no way around plastic embrittlement and rubber decomposing. You can prolong it with the right storage conditions, but those molecules are gonna break down sooner or later.

Same, but I didn't spend a lot of time putting my grubby hands on those computers.

Luckily I'm not a kernel maintainer, but it seems like they don't have 10-20 years to make hard practical decisions. It's easy to get rid of old unmaintained drivers, but they have to solidify interfaces much more as it is getting exponentially easier to find and use bugs or any unspecified part of the kernel for attacking it.

There was a very interesting point when people who were creating Rust interfaces were asking hard questions about ownerships and lifetimes in driver interfaces from the C linux maintainers and they didn't really care to answer (just wanted to wish Rust away).

Now with AI these questions are getting practical. Fortunately big companies have big stake in keeping linux secure, so I'm not worried about it being addressed at least.

I think this conflates two different eras/layers. NT 4 famously moved the window manager/GDI/graphics subsystem into kernel mode, so that’s probably the “opposite direction” history. But modern GPU-driver recovery is WDDM/TDR, and it very much still exists: WDDM splits the display driver into user-mode and kernel-mode components, and TDR resets/recovers a hung GPU/driver instead of requiring a reboot.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/d... https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/d...

I also update NVIDIA drivers regularly on Windows 11 without rebooting, though that’s install-time driver reload rather than exactly the same thing as TDR.

No it's the opposite. WDDM and DirectX are constantly being updated and have been improving crash recovery of the GPU, updating its driver, power management, abstracting features like video encoding and storage DMA, among many things. In Linux it is taking ages, the first proposal for DRM to support 2010 era WDDM features was in 2021 and it still does not exist. Graphics is one of the few places some of Microsoft still innovates. Although not in the sense of having great code, they just put in the work to coordinate these changes from the handful of vendors. If only someone hosted more steak dinners for Linux.

But that code would have to be selected in menuconfig, compiled, and the module loaded. I assume that nobody does that for bus mice, and even if someone, by mistake, selects one of the drivers, that's 1 machine in a billion. Who would target that?

Same argument for any retro-tech. What hacker would spend hours/days to hack my bare-metal DOS box running Arachne + a packet driver just to mine bitcoins on a K6-2 for a couple of hours until I turn it off from the AT power switch (not button).

From my understanding, that isn't how drivers in Linux work. Nearly no kernels will have that code compiled into them because kconfig won't call for it. It is "opt-in", and it is so niche few Distros would have done so.

Linux only ships with a tiny sub-set of the drivers in the source tree.

To add to this, as long as the diff representing the removal of the driver is kept in the git history it would be trivial for someone in the far future to say to an AI agent:

"Please take this linux source and patch the Bus mouse driver back in but match the new driver interface".

With code preserved in git history it's never actually "removed". It's just, disconnected.