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: register_ioctl32_conversion() / unregister_ioctl32_conversion() When: April 2005 Why: Replaced by ->compat_ioctl in file_operations and other method vecors. Who: Andi Kleen , Christoph Hellwig --------------------------- 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