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. The suggested deprecation period is 3 releases.
What: ddebug_query=”query” boot cmdline param
When: v3.8
Why: obsoleted by dyndbg=”query” and module.dyndbg=”query”
Who: Jim Cromie jim.cromie@gmail.com, Jason Baron jbaron@redhat.com
What: PRISM54
When: 2.6.34
Why: prism54 FullMAC PCI / Cardbus devices used to be supported only by the
prism54 wireless driver. After Intersil stopped selling these
devices in preference for the newer more flexible SoftMAC devices
a SoftMAC device driver was required and prism54 did not support
them. The p54pci driver now exists and has been present in the kernel for
a while. This driver supports both SoftMAC devices and FullMAC devices.
The main difference between these devices was the amount of memory which
could be used for the firmware. The SoftMAC devices support a smaller
amount of memory. Because of this the SoftMAC firmware fits into FullMAC
devices’s memory. p54pci supports not only PCI / Cardbus but also USB
and SPI. Since p54pci supports all devices prism54 supports
you will have a conflict. I’m not quite sure how distributions are
handling this conflict right now. prism54 was kept around due to
claims users may experience issues when using the SoftMAC driver.
Time has passed users have not reported issues. If you use prism54
and for whatever reason you cannot use p54pci please let us know!
E-mail us at: linux-wireless@vger.kernel.org
For more information see the p54 wiki page:
http://wireless.kernel.org/en/users/Drivers/p54
Who: Luis R. Rodriguez lrodriguez@atheros.com
What: AR9170USB
When: 2.6.40
Why: This driver is deprecated and the firmware is no longer
maintained. The replacement driver “carl9170” has been
around for a while, so the devices are still supported.
Who: Christian Lamparter chunkeey@googlemail.com
What: IRQF_SAMPLE_RANDOM
Check: IRQF_SAMPLE_RANDOM
When: July 2009
Why: Many of IRQF_SAMPLE_RANDOM users are technically bogus as entropy
sources in the kernel’s current entropy model. To resolve this, every
input point to the kernel’s entropy pool needs to better document the
type of entropy source it actually is. This will be replaced with
additional add_*_randomness functions in drivers/char/random.c
Who: Robin Getz rgetz@blackfin.uclinux.org & Matt Mackall mpm@selenic.com
What: The ieee80211_regdom module parameter
When: March 2010 / desktop catchup
Why: This was inherited by the CONFIG_WIRELESS_OLD_REGULATORY code,
and currently serves as an option for users to define an
ISO / IEC 3166 alpha2 code for the country they are currently
present in. Although there are userspace API replacements for this
through nl80211 distributions haven’t yet caught up with implementing
decent alternatives through standard GUIs. Although available as an
option through iw or wpa_supplicant its just a matter of time before
distributions pick up good GUI options for this. The ideal solution
would actually consist of intelligent designs which would do this for
the user automatically even when travelling through different countries.
Until then we leave this module parameter as a compromise.
When userspace improves with reasonable widely-available alternatives for
this we will no longer need this module parameter. This entry hopes that
by the super-futuristically looking date of "March 2010" we will have
such replacements widely available.
Who: Luis R. Rodriguez lrodriguez@atheros.com
What: CONFIG_WIRELESS_OLD_REGULATORY - old static regulatory information
When: March 2010 / desktop catchup
Why: The old regulatory infrastructure has been replaced with a new one
which does not require statically defined regulatory domains. We do
not want to keep static regulatory domains in the kernel due to the
the dynamic nature of regulatory law and localization. We kept around
the old static definitions for the regulatory domains of:
* US
* JP
* EU
and used by default the US when CONFIG_WIRELESS_OLD_REGULATORY was
set. We will remove this option once the standard Linux desktop catches
up with the new userspace APIs we have implemented.
Who: Luis R. Rodriguez lrodriguez@atheros.com
What: dev->power.power_state
When: July 2007
Why: Broken design for runtime control over driver power states, confusing
driver-internal runtime power management with: mechanisms to support
system-wide sleep state transitions; event codes that distinguish
different phases of swsusp “sleep” transitions; and userspace policy
inputs. This framework was never widely used, and most attempts to
use it were broken. Drivers should instead be exposing domain-specific
interfaces either to kernel or to userspace.
Who: Pavel Machek pavel@suse.cz
What: Video4Linux API 1 ioctls and from Video devices.
When: July 2009
Files: include/linux/videodev.h
Check: include/linux/videodev.h
Why: V4L1 AP1 was replaced by V4L2 API during migration from 2.4 to 2.6
series. The old API have lots of drawbacks and don’t provide enough
means to work with all video and audio standards. The newer API is
already available on the main drivers and should be used instead.
Newer drivers should use v4l_compat_translate_ioctl function to handle
old calls, replacing to newer ones.
Decoder iocts are using internally to allow video drivers to
communicate with video decoders. This should also be improved to allow
V4L2 calls being translated into compatible internal ioctls.
Compatibility ioctls will be provided, for a while, via
v4l1-compat module.
Who: Mauro Carvalho Chehab mchehab@infradead.org
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 linux@brodo.de
What: sys_sysctl
When: September 2010
Option: CONFIG_SYSCTL_SYSCALL
Why: The same information is available in a more convenient from
/proc/sys, and none of the sysctl variables appear to be
important performance wise.
Binary sysctls are a long standing source of subtle kernel
bugs and security issues.
When I looked several months ago all I could find after
searching several distributions were 5 user space programs and
glibc (which falls back to /proc/sys) using this syscall.
The man page for sysctl(2) documents it as unusable for user
space programs.
sysctl(2) is not generally ABI compatible to a 32bit user
space application on a 64bit and a 32bit kernel.
For the last several months the policy has been no new binary
sysctls and no one has put forward an argument to use them.
Binary sysctls issues seem to keep happening appearing so
properly deprecating them (with a warning to user space) and a
2 year grace warning period will mean eventually we can kill
them and end the pain.
In the mean time individual binary sysctls can be dealt with
in a piecewise fashion.
Who: Eric Biederman ebiederm@xmission.com
What: remove EXPORT_SYMBOL(kernel_thread)
When: August 2006
Files: arch//kernel/_ksyms.c
Check: kernel_thread
Why: kernel_thread is a low-level implementation detail. Drivers should
use the <linux/kthread.h> API instead which shields them from
implementation details and provides a higherlevel interface that
prevents bugs and code duplication
Who: Christoph Hellwig hch@lst.de
What: Unused EXPORT_SYMBOL/EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL exports
(temporary transition config option provided until then)
The transition config option will also be removed at the same time.
When: before 2.6.19
Why: Unused symbols are both increasing the size of the kernel binary
and are often a sign of “wrong API”
Who: Arjan van de Ven arjan@linux.intel.com
What: PHYSDEVPATH, PHYSDEVBUS, PHYSDEVDRIVER in the uevent environment
When: October 2008
Why: The stacking of class devices makes these values misleading and
inconsistent.
Class devices should not carry any of these properties, and bus
devices have SUBSYTEM and DRIVER as a replacement.
Who: Kay Sievers kay.sievers@suse.de
What: ACPI procfs interface
When: July 2008
Why: ACPI sysfs conversion should be finished by January 2008.
ACPI procfs interface will be removed in July 2008 so that
there is enough time for the user space to catch up.
Who: Zhang Rui rui.zhang@intel.com
What: /proc/acpi/button
When: August 2007
Why: /proc/acpi/button has been replaced by events to the input layer
since 2.6.20.
Who: Len Brown len.brown@intel.com
What: /proc/acpi/event
When: February 2008
Why: /proc/acpi/event has been replaced by events via the input layer
and netlink since 2.6.23.
Who: Len Brown len.brown@intel.com
What: i386/x86_64 bzImage symlinks
When: April 2010
Why: The i386/x86_64 merge provides a symlink to the old bzImage
location so not yet updated user space tools, e.g. package
scripts, do not break.
Who: Thomas Gleixner tglx@linutronix.de
What (Why):
- xt_recent: the old ipt_recent proc dir
(superseded by /proc/net/xt_recent)
When: January 2009 or Linux 2.7.0, whichever comes first
Why: Superseded by newer revisions or modules
Who: Jan Engelhardt jengelh@computergmbh.de
What: GPIO autorequest on gpio_direction_{input,output}() in gpiolib
When: February 2010
Why: All callers should use explicit gpio_request()/gpio_free().
The autorequest mechanism in gpiolib was provided mostly as a
migration aid for legacy GPIO interfaces (for SOC based GPIOs).
Those users have now largely migrated. Platforms implementing
the GPIO interfaces without using gpiolib will see no changes.
Who: David Brownell dbrownell@users.sourceforge.net
What: b43 support for firmware revision < 410
When: The schedule was July 2008, but it was decided that we are going to keep the
code as long as there are no major maintanance headaches.
So it _could_ be removed _any_ time now, if it conflicts with something new.
Why: The support code for the old firmware hurts code readability/maintainability
and slightly hurts runtime performance. Bugfixes for the old firmware
are not provided by Broadcom anymore.
Who: Michael Buesch mb@bu3sch.de
What: usedac i386 kernel parameter
When: 2.6.27
Why: replaced by allowdac and no dac combination
Who: Glauber Costa gcosta@redhat.com
What: print_fn_descriptor_symbol()
When: October 2009
Why: The %pF vsprintf format provides the same functionality in a
simpler way. print_fn_descriptor_symbol() is deprecated but
still present to give out-of-tree modules time to change.
Who: Bjorn Helgaas bjorn.helgaas@hp.com
What: /sys/o2cb symlink
When: January 2010
Why: /sys/fs/o2cb is the proper location for this information - /sys/o2cb
exists as a symlink for backwards compatibility for old versions of
ocfs2-tools. 2 years should be sufficient time to phase in new versions
which know to look in /sys/fs/o2cb.
Who: ocfs2-devel@oss.oracle.com
What: SCTP_GET_PEER_ADDRS_NUM_OLD, SCTP_GET_PEER_ADDRS_OLD,
SCTP_GET_LOCAL_ADDRS_NUM_OLD, SCTP_GET_LOCAL_ADDRS_OLD
When: June 2009
Why: A newer version of the options have been introduced in 2005 that
removes the limitions of the old API. The sctp library has been
converted to use these new options at the same time. Any user
space app that directly uses the old options should convert to using
the new options.
Who: Vlad Yasevich vladislav.yasevich@hp.com
What: Ability for non root users to shm_get hugetlb pages based on mlock
resource limits
When: 2.6.31
Why: Non root users need to be part of /proc/sys/vm/hugetlb_shm_group or
have CAP_IPC_LOCK to be able to allocate shm segments backed by
huge pages. The mlock based rlimit check to allow shm hugetlb is
inconsistent with mmap based allocations. Hence it is being
deprecated.
Who: Ravikiran Thirumalai kiran@scalex86.org
What: CONFIG_THERMAL_HWMON
When: January 2009
Why: This option was introduced just to allow older lm-sensors userspace
to keep working over the upgrade to 2.6.26. At the scheduled time of
removal fixed lm-sensors (2.x or 3.x) should be readily available.
Who: Rene Herman rene.herman@gmail.com
What: Code that is now under CONFIG_WIRELESS_EXT_SYSFS
(in net/core/net-sysfs.c)
When: After the only user (hal) has seen a release with the patches
for enough time, probably some time in 2010.
Why: Over 1K .text/.data size reduction, data is available in other
ways (ioctls)
Who: Johannes Berg johannes@sipsolutions.net
What: sysfs ui for changing p4-clockmod parameters
When: September 2009
Why: See commits 129f8ae9b1b5be94517da76009ea956e89104ce8 and
e088e4c9cdb618675874becb91b2fd581ee707e6.
Removal is subject to fixing any remaining bugs in ACPI which may
cause the thermal throttling not to happen at the right time.
Who: Dave Jones davej@redhat.com, Matthew Garrett mjg@redhat.com
What: __do_IRQ all in one fits nothing interrupt handler
When: 2.6.32
Why: __do_IRQ was kept for easy migration to the type flow handlers.
More than two years of migration time is enough.
Who: Thomas Gleixner tglx@linutronix.de
What: fakephp and associated sysfs files in /sys/bus/pci/slots/
When: 2011
Why: In 2.6.27, the semantics of /sys/bus/pci/slots was redefined to
represent a machine’s physical PCI slots. The change in semantics
had userspace implications, as the hotplug core no longer allowed
drivers to create multiple sysfs files per physical slot (required
for multi-function devices, e.g.). fakephp was seen as a developer’s
tool only, and its interface changed. Too late, we learned that
there were some users of the fakephp interface.
In 2.6.30, the original fakephp interface was restored. At the same
time, the PCI core gained the ability that fakephp provided, namely
function-level hot-remove and hot-add.
Since the PCI core now provides the same functionality, exposed in:
/sys/bus/pci/rescan
/sys/bus/pci/devices/.../remove
/sys/bus/pci/devices/.../rescan
there is no functional reason to maintain fakephp as well.
We will keep the existing module so that 'modprobe fakephp' will
present the old /sys/bus/pci/slots/... interface for compatibility,
but users are urged to migrate their applications to the API above.
After a reasonable transition period, we will remove the legacy
fakephp interface.
Who: Alex Chiang achiang@hp.com
What: i2c-voodoo3 driver
When: October 2009
Why: Superseded by tdfxfb. I2C/DDC support used to live in a separate
driver but this caused driver conflicts.
Who: Jean Delvare khali@linux-fr.org
Krzysztof Helt krzysztof.h1@wp.pl
What: CONFIG_RFKILL_INPUT
When: 2.6.33
Why: Should be implemented in userspace, policy daemon.
Who: Johannes Berg johannes@sipsolutions.net
What: CONFIG_INOTIFY
When: 2.6.33
Why: last user (audit) will be converted to the newer more generic
and more easily maintained fsnotify subsystem
Who: Eric Paris eparis@redhat.com
What: lock_policy_rwsem_* and unlock_policy_rwsem_* will not be
exported interface anymore.
When: 2.6.33
Why: cpu_policy_rwsem has a new cleaner definition making it local to
cpufreq core and contained inside cpufreq.c. Other dependent
drivers should not use it in order to safely avoid lockdep issues.
Who: Venkatesh Pallipadi venkatesh.pallipadi@intel.com
What: sound-slot/service-* module aliases and related clutters in
sound/sound_core.c
When: August 2010
Why: OSS sound_core grabs all legacy minors (0-255) of SOUND_MAJOR
(14) and requests modules using custom sound-slot/service-*
module aliases. The only benefit of doing this is allowing
use of custom module aliases which might as well be considered
a bug at this point. This preemptive claiming prevents
alternative OSS implementations.
Till the feature is removed, the kernel will be requesting
both sound-slot/service-* and the standard char-major-* module
aliases and allow turning off the pre-claiming selectively via
CONFIG_SOUND_OSS_CORE_PRECLAIM and soundcore.preclaim_oss
kernel parameter.
After the transition phase is complete, both the custom module
aliases and switches to disable it will go away. This removal
will also allow making ALSA OSS emulation independent of
sound_core. The dependency will be broken then too.
Who: Tejun Heo tj@kernel.org
What: Support for VMware’s guest paravirtuliazation technique [VMI] will be
dropped.
When: 2.6.37 or earlier.
Why: With the recent innovations in CPU hardware acceleration technologies
from Intel and AMD, VMware ran a few experiments to compare these
techniques to guest paravirtualization technique on VMware’s platform.
These hardware assisted virtualization techniques have outperformed the
performance benefits provided by VMI in most of the workloads. VMware
expects that these hardware features will be ubiquitous in a couple of
years, as a result, VMware has started a phased retirement of this
feature from the hypervisor. We will be removing this feature from the
Kernel too. Right now we are targeting 2.6.37 but can retire earlier if
technical reasons (read opportunity to remove major chunk of pvops)
arise.
Please note that VMI has always been an optimization and non-VMI kernels
still work fine on VMware's platform.
Latest versions of VMware's product which support VMI are,
Workstation 7.0 and VSphere 4.0 on ESX side, future maintainence
releases for these products will continue supporting VMI.
For more details about VMI retirement take a look at this,
http://blogs.vmware.com/guestosguide/2009/09/vmi-retirement.html
Who: Alok N Kataria akataria@vmware.com
What: access to nfsd auth cache through sys_nfsservctl or ‘.’ files
in the ‘nfsd’ filesystem.
When: 2.6.40
Why: This is a legacy interface which have been replaced by a more
dynamic cache. Continuing to maintain this interface is an
unnecessary burden.
Who: NeilBrown neilb@suse.de
What: pci_scan_bus_parented()
When: 3.5
Why: The pci_scan_bus_parented() interface creates a new root bus. The
bus is created with default resources (ioport_resource and
iomem_resource) that are always wrong, so we rely on arch code to
correct them later. Callers of pci_scan_bus_parented() should
convert to using pci_scan_root_bus() so they can supply a list of
bus resources when the bus is created.
Who: Bjorn Helgaas bhelgaas@google.com
