Re: [PATCH net-next 1/2] net: cs89x0: remove ISA bus probing

Simon Horman
2026-05-01T14:21:48Z

On Wed, Apr 29, 2026 at 04:55:45PM +0200, Arnd Bergmann wrote:
> From: Arnd Bergmann <arnd@arndb.de>
>
> The cs89x0 driver is really two in one, and they are mutually exclusive:
>
> - the ISA driver was used on 486-era PCs. It likely has no remaining
> users, like the other ethernet drivers that got removed in
> linux-7.1. The DMA support in here is the last device driver use of
> the deprecated isa_bus_to_virt() interface, all other users are either
> x86 specific or or got converted to the normal dma-mapping interface.
> The driver was maintained by Andrew Morton at the time, based on
> the linux-2.2 vendor driver from Cirrus Logic.
>
> - the platform_driver instance was used on some embedded Arm boards
> around the same time, such as the EP7211 Development Kit. This
> is the same chip, but uses modern devicetree based probing and no DMA.
> This was added by Alexander Shiyan.
>
> Remove the ISA driver as a cleanup, including all of the outdated
> documentation referring to its configuration.
>
> Cc: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
> Signed-off-by: Arnd Bergmann <arnd@arndb.de>

Thanks Arnd,

With the increase in both AI generated patches and review,
and the maintainer effort required to process these, the
cost of maintaining unused code has become entirely non-negligible.
So I welcome efforts to reduce that surface.

I note that there is an AI generated review of this patch available on
sashkio.dev. I believe that covers only pre-existing issues. And I
illustrates the point I've made above. I do not believe that review should
block progress of this patch.

Reviewed-by: Simon Horman <horms@kernel.org>

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