> 1. The old getdents stuff. It's ages old and akin to *very* old libc-5.0.xx
>
> If somebody needs compatibility which gets thus far, he/she should
> just simple stick with the older kernel.
> (4k)
This might be interesting.
> 2. The whole console selection related ioctl stuff.
>
> It was broken from the beginning on. There is currently a new
> replacement mechanism: /dev/vcs, which should provide the same
> funcionality. Removing it will only break the in my oppinion
> anyway toyish mouse selection on text based consoles. This is
> something that will not break the system since this
> functionality isn't essential for operation.
> (8k)
Lots of people use this. First make GPM use /dev/vcs* and then think
of removing this feature. I.e., not for 2.2.
> 3. Due to 2. we could even remove the wholy broken und useless unicde
> stuff in the current console code.
>
> It's only used in code related to 2. With the new mechanism for
> console selection this should get handled in user space. And
> please remember I'm not talking about unicode or whatever here.
> It's only about the selection stuff in the current kernel.
> (8k)
No, lots of people use the unicode stuff as it's the only sane way to using
non-ISO-8859-1 charsets and still being able to draw VT100/IBM graphics.
> 4. There is plenty of debugging code in the serial driver, which remains
> enabled, even after *years* of testing. (16k)
I think it should be just ifdef'd out.
> 5. The slab allocator contains may many glorious features not used by
> anybody in the current kernel.
They are used when debugging parts of the kernel. Maybe make them optional,
but certainly don't remove them.
Have a nice fortnight
-- Martin `MJ' Mares <mj@ucw.cz> http://atrey.karlin.mff.cuni.cz/~mj/ Faculty of Math and Physics, Charles University, Prague, Czech Rep., Earth "Do not believe in miracles -- rely on them."- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu