Linux To Drop Support For 15 Year Old, Never-Shipped Intel "Carillo Ranch"

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Linux To Drop Support For 15 Year Old, Never-Shipped Intel "Carillo Ranch"

With Intel's very timely upstream Linux hardware support going back years, they typically start on the upstream hardware enablement well in advance of the product's planned public launch. On a number of occasions this has meant adding support to the Linux kernel for hardware that never ends up being released to consumers. There's been recent cases like the Thunder Bay support that was dropped from the kernel after it became clear that the SoC would never ship to now a more extreme case of a driver being in the mainline kernel for 15 years to support never-released hardware...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-Drop-Intel-Carillo-Ranch

[jeisom]

I wonder how many drivers or how much code is in the kernel to support for hardware that never shipped, obviously excluding the recent enablement.

[CommunityMember]

I wonder how many drivers or how much code is in the kernel to support for hardware that never shipped, obviously excluding the recent enablement.

Do you count hardware that is used only inside specific companies as never shipped? Even the recent drivers for the nitro hardware is likely never going to be shipped outside AWS itself. The better measure, I would think, is "no longer in use in modern kernels" (some of the drivers in the kernel may very well support hardware that has never had a more recent kernel than 15 years ago, and never will).

[jeisom]

Do you count hardware that is used only inside specific companies as never shipped? Even the recent drivers for the nitro hardware is likely never going to be shipped outside AWS itself. The better measure, I would think, is "no longer in use in modern kernels" (some of the drivers in the kernel may very well support hardware that has never had a more recent kernel than 15 years ago, and never will).

I would qualify a scenario like you describe as shipped. I feel like the "better measure" side is a separate issue all together. It obviously is not a simple issue to say what hardware is still being used by newer releases vs not and when to depreciate it. The kernel doesn't have any telemetry uploaded after all.