# Ugh, what?  twa(4) being deprecated?



## msplsh (Jan 17, 2021)

rS360063: twa(4) deprecation notice





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						twa(4)
					






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Went to check support for adding more drives with a 3Ware 9690SA-8E.  14 years is all you get!  Couldn't find much about why... anybody know? Very disappointing.


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## George (Jan 18, 2021)

Looking at the man files twe() is for the 3ware 5000-8000 series, twa() is for the 9000-9500 series, and tws() for the 9750+.





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						twa(4)
					






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## diizzy (Jan 18, 2021)

You're still free to either maintain the driver yourself, pay someone to do it or stick to 12. Unfortunately drivers can't be maintained until the end of time because code evolve and you also need interest, time and actual hardware to maintain drivers. September 2013 is the newest drivers I can find from the manufacturer (irregardless of OS) so I'm going to say that you had a pretty good run for "free" support. I for one appreciate the honesty rather than keep claiming that it's supported and it's not working or poorly.

Depending where you live it may not be that much of a deal replacing it with something supported without breaking the bank.
https://www.newegg.com/p/1B3-002F-00002 (35$ refurb)


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## msplsh (Jan 18, 2021)

The card is identified by twa, not the others.

It would be nice to get some kind of "hey this driver needs X" note before killing it.  If I hadn't dug around I wouldn't have found it.  The aha driver supports cards from 1990, so "you had a pretty good run for free support" is kind of "hunh what?"  Support in general is kind of free for the OS?  I just remember there was an announcement earlier about _planning_ on dropping some network card support which made people wake up and go "hey, wait" and that decision was partially changed due to community response.  This seems very un-announced and not planned.  From my estimation the 3ware cards were very popular for NAS builds so this seems very surprising.

I put in a Areca controller that unfortunately hasn't had its open source driver updated since 10.0, but has a binary release for 12.2, simply because it was better behaved than the 3ware when I had these in my Mac Pro.


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## PMc (Jan 18, 2021)

diizzy said:


> Depending where you live it may not be that much of a deal replacing it with something supported without breaking the bank.
> https://www.newegg.com/p/1B3-002F-00002 (35$ refurb)


That we are supposed to have ample money is not the point. The point is that all the hardware, when sorted out as no longer useful, goes to a waste heap (usually in Africa) in order to poison the environment.
So if some old hardware is still in working condition and good for the duty, it is always preferable to continue using it and thereby slowing the produce-to-poison cycle a bit.


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## diizzy (Jan 18, 2021)

PMc said:


> That we are supposed to have ample money is not the point. The point is that all the hardware, when sorted out as no longer useful, goes to a waste heap (usually in Africa) in order to poison the environment.
> So if some old hardware is still in working condition and good for the duty, it is always preferable to continue using it and thereby slowing the produce-to-poison cycle a bit.


I think you're missing the point, 12 still carries the driver and there's nothing stopping you from using it 20 years from now or for that matter you maintaining it and so on. You can use old hardware but it obviously comes with some limitations. While it's technically possible to still use an old Pentium II (or similar in performance) computer it'll very likely be unbearably slow to use as a desktop, are you going to demand that the whole world is going to adapt to your hardware?

Support in this case means that the project as a whole has decided to drop support because of one or several reasons such as interest, documentation, hardware available etc. The code is free and if someone wants to provide an improved driver it would be perfectly fine to keep it as a port however I don't understand why people think it's their "right" to get support.

..and lets put it into a better perspective, say the driver is kept and because if its status (in tree / supported) people still use it and it turns out there's a nasty bug that corrupts your data. Are you going to blame yourself or blame a project/person for claiming the driver being supported despite no one is able to work on and test the driver not to mention the potential data loss? Just because something compiles doesn't mean that it works as intended.


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## msplsh (Jan 18, 2021)

Look, I'm sure there's reasons for the commit that marked it for removal.  I already know what I _could_ do about it and it doesn't really matter what the reasons _could_ be (may be completely understandable.) I simply want to know what they *are* and if anybody has any idea where to find that information.


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## PMc (Jan 18, 2021)

diizzy said:


> I think you're missing the point, 12 still carries the driver and there's nothing stopping you from using it 20 years from now or for that matter you maintaining it and so on. You can use old hardware but it obviously comes with some limitations. While it's technically possible to still use an old Pentium II (or similar in performance) computer it'll very likely be unbearably slow to use as a desktop, are you going to demand that the whole world is going to adapt to your hardware?


Yes, I understand that. There is a very strong urge to throw away things nowadays. In the internet more and more merchants start to offer a new service: they offer to throw away the freshly bought products before even sending them to their customers, so that these spare the hassle of having to receive them.



diizzy said:


> Support in this case means that the project as a whole has decided to drop support because of one or several reasons such as interest, documentation, hardware available etc. The code is free and if someone wants to provide an improved driver it would be perfectly fine to keep it as a port however I don't understand why people think it's their "right" to get support.


Nobody implied any "right" to get any support. Only the question was raised about the _reason_ for dropping support. And in my viewpoint such question is absolutely valid, due to the beforementioned facts (Africa etc.).



diizzy said:


> ..and lets put it into a better perspective, say the driver is kept and because if its status (in tree / supported) people still use it and it turns out there's a nasty bug that corrupts your data. Are you going to blame yourself or blame a project/person for claiming the driver being supported despite no one is able to work on and test the driver not to mention the potential data loss? Just because something compiles doesn't mean that it works as intended.


That's bogus. We have a user here, and maybe that user would be willing to run test cases. At this point *we just don't know*.
But this is exactly the problem that comes from the Ivory-Tower-League: per definition there has to be a strict separation between the users and the development, and per definition the users have to be extremely stupid and behave like you describe in this paragraph.


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## George (Jan 18, 2021)

You could ask the committer (imp) or the author of the driver (mentionend in the man file). There is also the freebsd-current mailing list.

 My guess is that some subsystem (CAM?) changed and thus the driver needs an update.


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## msplsh (Jan 18, 2021)

Asking imp directly is currently my plan absent any new information.


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## diizzy (Jan 18, 2021)

msplsh said:


> Asking imp directly is currently my plan absent any new information.


I think I've found the answer, at least twa and tws were vendor maintained drivers and since AMCC 3ware (--> LSI --> Broadcom) vendor support is long gone there is no way to maintain the drivers.





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## msplsh (Jan 18, 2021)

Don't buy it.  Using that logic aha should have been deleted decades ago.

Looks like they recently swept the tree and marked it as not needing the giant lock, too...


			https://reviews.freebsd.org/D23718?id=68841#change-7lB5RvAgJ7Kr


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## diizzy (Jan 18, 2021)

https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/svn-src-head/2018-October/119024.html ?
Not all product drivers are necessarily vendor provided, it might just be limited to a series or such.


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## msplsh (Jan 18, 2021)

Doesn't seem like that commit landed in 12.  aha is gone in 13, though.  Again, this driver supports cards double the age of the one I'm fussing about.









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