The following is a list of files and features that are going to be removed in the kernel source tree. Every entry should contain what exactly is going away, why it is happening, and who is going to be doing the work. When the feature is removed from the kernel, it should also be removed from this file. --------------------------- What: devfs When: July 2005 Files: fs/devfs/*, include/linux/devfs_fs*.h and assorted devfs function calls throughout the kernel tree Why: It has been unmaintained for a number of years, has unfixable races, contains a naming policy within the kernel that is against the LSB, and can be replaced by using udev. Who: Greg Kroah-Hartman --------------------------- What: ACPI S4bios support When: May 2005 Why: Noone uses it, and it probably does not work, anyway. swsusp is faster, more reliable, and people are actually using it. Who: Pavel Machek --------------------------- What: PCI Name Database (CONFIG_PCI_NAMES) When: July 2005 Why: It bloats the kernel unnecessarily, and is handled by userspace better (pciutils supports it.) Will eliminate the need to try to keep the pci.ids file in sync with the sf.net database all of the time. Who: Greg Kroah-Hartman --------------------------- What: io_remap_page_range() (macro or function) When: September 2005 Why: Replaced by io_remap_pfn_range() which allows more memory space addressabilty (by using a pfn) and supports sparc & sparc64 iospace as part of the pfn. Who: Randy Dunlap --------------------------- What: RAW driver (CONFIG_RAW_DRIVER) When: December 2005 Why: declared obsolete since kernel 2.6.3 O_DIRECT can be used instead Who: Adrian Bunk --------------------------- What: RCU API moves to EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL When: April 2006 Files: include/linux/rcupdate.h, kernel/rcupdate.c Why: Outside of Linux, the only implementations of anything even vaguely resembling RCU that I am aware of are in DYNIX/ptx, VM/XA, Tornado, and K42. I do not expect anyone to port binary drivers or kernel modules from any of these, since the first two are owned by IBM and the last two are open-source research OSes. So these will move to GPL after a grace period to allow people, who might be using implementations that I am not aware of, to adjust to this upcoming change. Who: Paul E. McKenney --------------------------- What: remove verify_area() When: July 2006 Files: Various uaccess.h headers. Why: Deprecated and redundant. access_ok() should be used instead. Who: Jesper Juhl --------------------------- What: IEEE1394 Audio and Music Data Transmission Protocol driver, Connection Management Procedures driver When: November 2005 Files: drivers/ieee1394/{amdtp,cmp}* Why: These are incomplete, have never worked, and are better implemented in userland via raw1394 (see http://freebob.sourceforge.net/ for example.) Who: Jody McIntyre --------------------------- What: raw1394: requests of type RAW1394_REQ_ISO_SEND, RAW1394_REQ_ISO_LISTEN When: November 2005 Why: Deprecated in favour of the new ioctl-based rawiso interface, which is more efficient. You should really be using libraw1394 for raw1394 access anyway. Who: Jody McIntyre --------------------------- What: i2c sysfs name change: in1_ref, vid deprecated in favour of cpu0_vid When: November 2005 Files: drivers/i2c/chips/adm1025.c, drivers/i2c/chips/adm1026.c Why: Match the other drivers' name for the same function, duplicate names will be available until removal of old names. Who: Grant Coady --------------------------- What: PCMCIA control ioctl (needed for pcmcia-cs [cardmgr, cardctl]) When: November 2005 Files: drivers/pcmcia/: pcmcia_ioctl.c Why: With the 16-bit PCMCIA subsystem now behaving (almost) like a normal hotpluggable bus, and with it using the default kernel infrastructure (hotplug, driver core, sysfs) keeping the PCMCIA control ioctl needed by cardmgr and cardctl from pcmcia-cs is unnecessary, and makes further cleanups and integration of the PCMCIA subsystem into the Linux kernel device driver model more difficult. The features provided by cardmgr and cardctl are either handled by the kernel itself now or are available in the new pcmciautils package available at http://kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/kernel/pcmcia/ Who: Dominik Brodowski --------------------------- What: ip_queue and ip6_queue (old ipv4-only and ipv6-only netfilter queue) When: December 2005 Why: This interface has been obsoleted by the new layer3-independent "nfnetlink_queue". The Kernel interface is compatible, so the old ip[6]tables "QUEUE" targets still work and will transparently handle all packets into nfnetlink queue number 0. Userspace users will have to link against API-compatible library on top of libnfnetlink_queue instead of the current 'libipq'. Who: Harald Welte