rm -r fs/ext3

Posted Jul 23, 2015 19:04 UTC (Thu) by linusw (subscriber, #40300)
Parent article: rm -r fs/ext3

As for stuff being left around "just in case it is needed", in early 2013 I had to get data off an MiniScribe MFM disk. (For youngsters, MFM was before IDE, which was before ATA which was before SATA.) The controller card was a PC XT card which could fit in a Pentium, with manually configured IRQ and removing the ROM, and fixing up the IN TREE driver, it WORKED, and extracted the data from the disk, with some help from ddrescue. The next kernel cycle the driver was deleted, because of being ancient, but I still for one was grateful for it being kept around.

Details:
http://dflund.se/~triad/krad/linux-on-pentium-mmx.html

Now grandpa will stop rambling.

to post comments

rm -r fs/ext3

Posted Jul 23, 2015 19:28 UTC (Thu) by pbonzini (subscriber, #60935) [Link] (1 responses)

We've been wondering all this time what the heck was on that drive!

rm -r fs/ext3

Posted Jul 23, 2015 22:07 UTC (Thu) by linusw (subscriber, #40300) [Link]

In 1993 I had my heart broken by a girl and she was significant, so I went home and wrote a long inspired piece of text about the same night, I always wanted to get back in and read it. Simple.

rm -r fs/ext3

Posted Jul 23, 2015 21:54 UTC (Thu) by aeruder (guest, #22597) [Link]

I 100% agree with your implied opinion that drivers shouldn't be removed because they aren't used. The major difference here is that there is still an in-tree driver that will handle ext3 -- and that is the ext4 driver.

rm -r fs/ext3

Posted Jul 24, 2015 0:30 UTC (Fri) by JdGordy (subscriber, #70103) [Link] (3 responses)

yeah, but for stupidly old hardware it pretty much implies there is no need to be running the latest kernel, so what would have been the problem if your driver was removed 5 years earlier when you still can get the old kernel source?

rm -r fs/ext3

Posted Jul 24, 2015 1:50 UTC (Fri) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (1 responses)

> so what would have been the problem if your driver was removed 5 years earlier when you still can get the old kernel source?

getting the rest of the distro to install along with the kernel so that you can use it.

rm -r fs/ext3

Posted Jul 24, 2015 1:56 UTC (Fri) by JdGordy (subscriber, #70103) [Link]

http://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/archive/ If the data on the disk is that important then fuffying around getting an old distro to install definitly sounds worth it.

rm -r fs/ext3

Posted Jul 28, 2015 22:30 UTC (Tue) by linusw (subscriber, #40300) [Link]

Bit rot. There is always some extra modern tool you need to compile (like ddrescue). And it need modern library deps too. The GCC for userspace is built with headers for some kernel version, forcing you to have an old toolchain too. And then it turns out that doesn't compile or run because the ABI changed. All of a sudden you're in an all-out legacy land trying to make things compile. That is usually a waste of time compared to just using the latest of everything, like you do every day.

rm -r fs/ext3

Posted Jul 24, 2015 2:46 UTC (Fri) by hobarrera (guest, #101888) [Link]

Honestly, I think that in these very special scenarios, it's just fine to use a very old kernel (eg: grab a Debian image from 10 years ago).

There's no need to run the latest kernel, and I don't think you'll be using that hardware for much more than copying your data.

rm -r fs/ext3

Posted Jul 24, 2015 12:42 UTC (Fri) by jezuch (subscriber, #52988) [Link]

> As for stuff being left around "just in case it is needed"...

A less extreme example is my NAS, which has a PATA port with a flash drive installed. It requires the "Legacy PATA" driver to work... slowly. Unfortunately stock Debian kernel does not have this module enabled so I'm forced to compile special kernels for this one machine.

rm -r fs/ext3

Posted Jul 24, 2015 19:21 UTC (Fri) by utoddl (guest, #1232) [Link]

I very recently pulled a SCSI hard drive out of my old Amiga 3000 and was able to get linux to mount the Amiga partitioned 5 volumes and read the whole 200MB of data there, some of which was actually useful to have again. I'm very glad those old linux kernel pieces were still available to make this possible. (It's not like the Amiga end of things has changed much in the last 20 years.)