Farewell ISDN, Ham Radio & Old Network Drivers: Linus Torvalds Merges 138k L.O.C. Removal

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_x_oOo_x_@reddit

Wait, ham radio is still in active use.. 🫨️

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cbarrick@reddit

The argument in the pull request is that HAM radio folks could be better served by userspace implementations.

Amateur radio did have occasional users (or so I think) but most users switched to user space implementations since its all super slow stuff.

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mkosmo@reddit

And they're right. I'm an active ham, but not at all offended by the removal of the kernel code. It doesn't need to be in the kernel.

And if we want it back? Kernel module.

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LeBigMartinH@reddit

I think I misunderstood. So, you'll still be able to use ham software, but you will have to install it yourself, basically.

Right?

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mkosmo@reddit

Ham software generally? Unaffected. Drivers for IP over ham radio? That’s what we’re losing.

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Can't you do IP over ham radio using TUN/TAP the same way VPNs work in userspace just fine, i.e. MAC/IP over UDP-based protocols? Sure, some stuff like Wireguard benefits from being in the kernel, but the difference is less often worth it.

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PredictiveFrame@reddit

Exactly. This is normal cleanup and maintenance. Old tutorials that have been unchanged since 1992 will need a couple sentences added telling newbies how to install the specific drivers. That's about it.

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speedyundeadhittite@reddit

AX.25 is a very specific implementation of X.25. When was the last time you used X.25 over a wire? I've been in this game a long time and I truly can't say more recent than 1997.

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LeBigMartinH@reddit

Okay. Considering I've never heard of this protocol or standard, I'm not remotely worried lol

Thanks for the explanation!

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cp5184@reddit

And if we want it back? Kernel module.

Do you think it wasn't modularized? Do you think every linux kernel today supports HAM radio?

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mkosmo@reddit

Fair point. My point is that the modules don’t need to be managed by mainstream Linux.

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bullwinkle8088@reddit

There were ISA card and PCMCIA card drivers. The physical hardware is mostly gone.

The detail seems to have been missed in the thread.

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flecom@reddit

Ham radio is super slow, fastest you will often see is blazing 9600baud over UHF, lower bands are going to be 300/1200 baud mostly

Some people do microwave stuff, think 1.2ghz dstar radios were doing 128kbps

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snowtax@reddit

Signal frequency certainly matters. It seems we have maxed the performance of the available 20 MHz channels in the 2.4 GHz band and people always want to go faster. Adding the 5 GHz and 6 GHz bands helped Wi-Fi a lot. But yes, lower frequencies are going to feel slow.

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flecom@reddit

20mhz? most of the bands data is happening are limited to to like 6khz? are you thinking of wifi?

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snowtax@reddit

I was merely thinking of frequency and symbol rate. I feel that most amateur service operators are interested in, or can afford, frequencies below GHz frequencies.

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speedyundeadhittite@reddit

Amateurs have a lot more bandwidth in GHz range, but equipment for it is super-rare, skills required to build on those frequencies are massively high compared to shortwave stuff.

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triemdedwiat@reddit

Chalk and cheese. Ham is global as opposed t the next hill.

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phylter99@reddit

Some of that stuff was in the kernel the first time I took a look at it... in the late 90's. Userspace implementations won't require kernel updates to operate, so I think it's very appropriate.

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zquzra@reddit

Ham radio is one of the most interesting communities I know.

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oxez@reddit

This used to be most communities in the early 2000s (including most Linux-related communities)

At some point you had to know what you were doing to even be on the internet lol

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Enthusedchameleon@reddit

September

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thegunnersdaughter@reddit

It never ends

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phantomzero@reddit

A month so bad Green Day wrote a song about it. /s

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EntertainmentMean611@reddit

Well I assume the GMRS drivers are still in place. /s

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h0uz3_@reddit

Absolutely! But also there‘s no need for the Linux kernel du support any of the equipment: Either the devices use audio lines or USB, both is well supported.

All the HAM related software is regular programs nowadays.

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khsh01@reddit

So now it needs to be injected in through an external kernel module?

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martyn_hare@reddit

Even in-tree it would have been built as an optional module.

Ubuntu (for example) ships ax25 but they have it blacklisted by default in /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-rare-network.conf meaning you had to go out of your way to allow the system to load it.

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khsh01@reddit

Thats an interesting way to handle it. Does its inclusion interfere with modern hardware?

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martyn_hare@reddit

The theory is that blacklisting them means you'd need root access to be able to load them in, and since they're compiled as modules, they won't affect anything unless deliberately loaded.

What boggles the mind though is why Ubuntu still builds these drivers when there isn't even a single example of Canonical-certified hardware which uses them, and not even any evidence that a real-world amd64 system can even use said hardware in the first place. Sometimes we're even talking about stuff that Debian (their upstream) omits from their kernel configuration.

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khsh01@reddit

If it ain't broke don't fix it

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anh0516@reddit (OP)

All this removal of hardware support is going to cause like 3 people to switch to NetBSD.

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mglyptostroboides@reddit

Ham radio operator who uses NetBSD reporting in.

My POTA rig is a Librebooted Thinkpad x60 with 4 GB of RAM and a 1.8GHz CPU that runs NetBSD 10.1.

I don't use the ax25 system though lololol. Never got packet stuff set up to work from scratch. I just use it for logging, controlling my transceiver and doing digital modes.

I suppose much of what I just said wouldn't make sense to non-radio people. I sometimes forget that there are different varieties of tech geek.

I also read manga and play games in SCUMMVM on that thing. God I love it to death.

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Glass-Medicine8609@reddit

SCUMMVM, huh. Could you tell me about LOOM? And what’s in that grog stuff, anyway?

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Teknikal_Domain@reddit

There are several dozen people I know still using the ax25 driver to this day. That one is actively in use.

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spectrumero@reddit

Surely these days AX25 is just better done in userland? (Just like an awful lot minor USB stuff moved away from kernel drivers to libusb)

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brimston3-@reddit

I use the ax25 driver. But I’m not opposed to it being out-of-tree because of how few people actually use it.

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orion3311@reddit

How do you leverage the driver?

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Teknikal_Domain@reddit

On that, you have a point.

The number of websites that just go "its supported by default" that will probably never get updated, is uh... I forsee a lot of "uhh help I'm trying to set up my own node and this doesn't work" chatter in the future.

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Nullcast@reddit

It's more of a systemic issue. If there is such an influx of AI bugreports that they are deleting code. They should start triage it in a way that actually makes sense.

Does the report affect a driver that is built in default config or perceivable is in the default config of a major distro? If no, doesn't really matter.

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RoomyRoots@reddit

NetBSD? More like NetBASED.

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creeper6530@reddit

Bold of you to assume that said 3 people use the latest kernel anyway

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gihutgishuiruv@reddit

2 of them were still on 2.6.32, and the other one was feeling spontaneous a few years back and went to 3.11 for the memes

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mrcs2000@reddit

lmao

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SevrinTheMuto@reddit

Goodbye my only change in the kernel: support for BT Ignition Pro terminal adapters (which were rebranded Zyxels but with a different device ID).

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spectrumero@reddit

That was one thing that was infuriating about the ISDN days, so many of the USB ISDN devices were weird proprietary things instead of just a ttyACM device that accepted AT commands. Most of these proprietary devices had no Linux support and you often didn't know till you got the device.

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tjorben123@reddit

nice.. so you contributed to the kernel one time. more than most of us could do.

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billhughes1960@reddit

128k ISDN. Those were the days. I looked smugly down upon those with 56k modems.

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SpeedDaemon1969@reddit

I would have too, except my ISP wanted a crazy surcharge for channel bonding. But 64 > 56, and having the second channel open for calls was handy back then.

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billhughes1960@reddit

I felt that the ISDN 64K felt MUCH faster than a 56k modem because it was an end to end digital signal, not digital encoded on an analog carrier. Few packets dropped, etc.

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yrro@reddit

It's because latency was like 90 ms not 300 ms as you got on dialup

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SpeedDaemon1969@reddit

Nevertheless, there's no such thing as a digital world. ISDN was also modulated by a modem and carried over an analog medium. ISDN used the exact same phone wires that POTS phones used. It was just a different modem. It was a more premium service, that's all.

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