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Linux 7.1 Removes Drivers for Bus Mouse Support
- whalesalad 7mo agothat pee stained microsoft mouse is really sending this home
- bastawhiz 7mo agoThis is the kind of spring cleaning I crave. Deleting busted drivers that haven't worked in over a decade? Fantastic! Some of this hardware likely has exactly zero users because the material it's made from can't possibly have survived. Look at the cord on the mouse in the photo: you might be able to plug it in, but I wouldn't bet money signal can still make it down the wire.
- trollbridge 7mo agoMy bus mouse still works just fine; things built in the 80s tended to be pretty solid. However, it would be hard pressed to find a machine with ISA slots with enough resources to run Linux 7.1 acceptably.
- cestith 7mo agoThere 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 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 https://duropc.com/product/r810-4p9i-4
- M95D 7mo agoISA slots are all identical. If you have one slot, you can multiply it to 100 slots just by connecting the wires.
- cestith 7mo agoThat’s one of those facts that’s always good to know, but in practice people tend to put one card in one slot with no expanders.
- SV_BubbleTime 7mo agoHow were different devices addressed? I assume it’s a master and slave system, but even then were address collisions automatically resolved?
- stackghost 7mo agoThey used 16-bit addresses from 0x0 to 0xffff.
- toast0 7mo ago> How were different devices addressed? There's a shared address bus. Each device responds to the i/o and/or memory addresses it's configured for. Configuration can be static, jumpers, isapnp. > I assume it’s a master and slave system, but even then were address collisions automatically resolved? No. If two devices want to use the same address space, you'll have problems. isapnp might help you out, but it was added in the second decade of ISA, so ... lots of things don't use it.
- tialaramex 7mo agoIn original ISA none of this is managed, the owner of the PC is expected to manually configure both hardware and software appropriately. So e.g. [with the PC turned off!] you move a tiny jumper (basically just a piece of conductive metal with a plastic housing) to the "IRQ 8" position and you pick "IRQ 8" in some menu or set it in an environment variable in DOS or whatever. By the time PCI is starting to appear there is some level of "Plug and Plug ISA" but it's fairly crazy because of course all the old stuff still exists whereas for PCI the bus always had this intelligence baked in so nobody just assumes they can pick.
- estimator7292 7mo agoMost 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.
- dpark 7mo ago> 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.
- Incipient 7mo agoI don't know how you'd confirm either way. A lot of stuff from the 80s is in landfill now because it's just old, even if not broken. I'm sure we built a lot of badly made stuff then too, but my guess is with our tighter manufacturing tolerances, we can push things closer to breaking point, with our increased casting/molding tech, we make stuff smaller and more complex, so it breaks more, we also drive harder to profit margins (unsourced claim!) so cutting corners/quality is more acceptable/planned obsolescence/planned failure.
- FpUser 7mo agoMy Z840 server I use for self hosting has both bus original IBM keyboard and bus mouse attached. Either works just fine.
- kube-system 7mo agoThe mouse in the photo was made somewhere between 1987-1993. I have computers older than that which work just fine.
- kstrauser 7mo agoSame, but I didn't spend a lot of time putting my grubby hands on those computers.
- flohofwoe 7mo agoRaises the question whether a bug in code that's never called actually exists ;)
- rationalist 7mo agoschrödinbug? https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/96973/whats-a-schr%C3%B6dinbug https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/9697...
- advisedwang 7mo agoCode that is never normally used can sometimes still be gotten to run by an attacker, and therefore can still be a security risk.
- M95D 7mo agoBut 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).
- advisedwang 7mo agoGood point. I guess I have this issue in the back of my mind [1], which was widely shipped with ffmpeg despite being basically never needed. [1] https://x.com/FFmpeg/status/1983949866725437791 https://x.com/FFmpeg/status/1983949866725437791
- Someone1234 7mo agoFrom 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.
- xiphias2 7mo agoMicrokernels have lost the open kernel wars because of their speed problems, but this is a great example of a driver that should have been running in userspace a long time ago, just like how Windows has been moving in that direction. Isn't Linux planning to do the same?
- augusto-moura 7mo agoI guess things are going into that direction naturally, but not officially. eBPF is helping with getting deep kernel aspects into userspace. And there's some ressurgence of out-of-tree graphics drivers, specially for gaming. I believe userspace drivers are much more powerful and easy to build than 10 years ago, but it is not from a requirement from the kernel. Who knows, maybe we will get a smaller (instead of bigger) kernel in 10-20 years
- xiphias2 7mo agoLuckily 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.
- e12e 7mo ago> this is a great example of a driver that should have been running in userspace a long time ago, just like how Windows has been moving in that direction. Hasn't windows (nt lineage) moved solidly in the opposite direction? Used to be you could reload/restart the video card ("GPU") driver if the driver crashed?
- doctorpangloss 7mo ago
- clifflocked 7mo agoIf anyone is curious, here is the actual commit that removed the drivers: https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=429e6c7f90d12a8551b3eaa9faca7cfaefd99b1d https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/lin...
- dpark 7mo agoWhat the hell. Kernel.org is mining in my browser to “make sure I’m not a bot”?
- rmunn 7mo agoPreventing scrapers from grabbing every single commit and feeding it to train an AI. (Instead of just, you know, cloning the repo and using the clone to feed the AI). Is this really the first time you've encountered the Anubis anti-scraper system? It's been everywhere the past few years, because so many of those scraper bots are incredibly lazily programmed. Many discussions here on HN have included people commenting on scraper bots hitting every single commit page, diff page, etc. on their self-hosted forges, burning up lots of CPU time and bandwidth to serve them what they could have just gotten by cloning the repo if the bot's programming was slightly more intelligent.
- dpark 7mo agoThis is the first time I have encountered this, yes. LLM training has really been a drain on the general internet :(
- rmunn 7mo agoIt's been showing up on just about any code forge that isn't GitHub, so odds are good your browser has encountered it but you didn't notice the Anubis screen until now (it often goes by so quickly you'll miss it if you blink, though that depends on the site).
- mongol 7mo agoWhat is a bus mouse? Is it using the old PS/2 port?
- VorpalWay 7mo agoThe PS/2 connector is what came after that the bus mouse. Back then the mouse was connected to a specialised add-in card. Probably an ISA card if I remember correctly.
- mayama 7mo agoNo, interface used before ps/2 that need ISA card to be used. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_mouse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_mouse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industry_Standard_Architecture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industry_Standard_Architecture
- rasz 7mo agohttps://blog.smallshire.no/blog/what-is-a-bus-mouse/ https://blog.smallshire.no/blog/what-is-a-bus-mouse/ tldr: Ball mouse containing only optical encoders and no other electronics. Very popular in late eighties. Atari ST, Amiga 500, Acorn Archimedes (the ARM computer) all used this type of mice because of price. Bus Mouse controller card used special Alps Electric 64H101 quadrature decoder and counter chip converting raw encoder outputs to neat X Y coordinates computer can read in just a couple of IO operations, much easier and quicker than serial or PS2 mouse.
- hackyhacky 7mo ago[flagged]
- shevy-java 7mo agoThis makes me sad. Now, most will say "but why, 1995 is ancient history, no such hardware exists anymore". The thing is ... should Linux get rid of what is old? I understand you have a smaller kernel when you have less code, less cost to maintain, I get it. Still, I wonder whether this should be the only allowed opinion. Would it not be better to, kind of, transition into a situation where any hardware built in the future, would be supported? So in 2050, we'd not say "damn, computers from 2026 are obsolete now". We could say "no problem, linux is forever". Everything is supported. I actually would prefer the latter than the "older than 30 years, we no longer support it".
- jamesgeck0 7mo agoThat date feels a little bit late. The PS/2 devices that superseded the bus mouse started appearing around 1987. There were certainly still bus mice around in 1995, but they were thoroughly obsolete.
- bigfishrunning 7mo ago> Would it not be better to, kind of, transition into a situation where any hardware built in the future, would be supported? easier said then done -- the kernel's internal interfaces aren't static, they change often. The project has never committed to stabilizing it's driver api, so every driver takes non-zero work to maintain. I would assume computers that are still running these old ISA mouses (mice?) probably are also running an older version of linux; and if they're running a new kernel then it'll be somebodys job to port the drivers forward. There's some likelihood this will end up maintained by someone out-of-tree, which is a nice way of saying "we've sent your dog to a farm upstate..."
- sockaddr 7mo agoTo 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.
- mmooss 7mo ago> looking to remove old drivers due to the surge of AI/LLM bug reports I wonder how OpenBSD's careful code quality and hygiene (maybe there's a better word) has affected its vulnerability to LLM bug finding. Did their approach pay off in this case?
- midtake 7mo agoIs this due to Mythos and other LLMs finding a bunch of obscure bugs or simply a precaution? If someone (a normie not a gentooman) wanted to run Linux on retro hardware how would they do it? Boot Debian Sarge?
- CodeWriter23 7mo agoThe old-fashioned way, build your own kernel with the driver included.
- guzfip 7mo agoDamn, there goes Linux as my retro computing target. Guess I’ll be porting dahdi to netbsd soon lol. Tbf, I get why Linux is dropping all this stuff. I wouldn’t mind becoming a maintainer of smaller drivers myself, but I doubt I have the skill level.
- jasomill 7mo agoNice to know my arbitrary choice of a serial mouse over a bus mouse would have finally paid off, had I not lost the mouse to a fire in the early '90s.