On Mon, Jan 12, 2026 at 11:09:05PM +0100, Thomas Bogendoerfer wrote:

On Sun, Jan 11, 2026 at 12:40:56AM +0000, Maciej W. Rozycki wrote:

quoted

[+cc Thomas, linux-mips]

On Fri, 9 Jan 2026, Simon Horman wrote:

quoted

quoted

This allows the code managing device instances to be simplified
significantly. The VLB bus is very obsolete and last appeared on
P5 Pentium-era hardware. Support for it has been removed from
other drivers, and it is highly unlikely anyone is using it with
modern Linux kernels.

Signed-off-by: Ethan Nelson-Moore <redacted>

Hi Ethan,

I don't think this driver has received much attention for some time.
So, unless you have hardware to test changes on, I would suggest
either leaving it alone or, if we suspect there are no users,
removing it.

 You mean discarding the whole of drivers/net/ethernet/amd/pcnet32.c?  If 
so, then it's a hard NAK from me.  It's the onboard/netboot interface of 
the MIPS Malta platform and it continues being used regularly, primarily 
with QEMU setups, although I have actual Malta hardware in my lab too, 
usually running 24/7.  It's one of the primary MIPS plaforms, cf. 
arch/mips/configs/malta_defconfig.

I have a few more MIPS systems with PCnet32 chip on board. And this
driver was the first network driver for VMware. I see no reason to
remove it as it simply works.

Understood. Thanks for the valuable feedback.