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Quotes of the weekQuotes of the weekPosted May 27, 2011 16:00 UTC (Fri) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)In reply to: Quotes of the week by pr1268 Parent article: Quotes of the week
ISA is still widely used on industrial hardware. And it's not going to be phased out for many years.
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Quotes of the week Posted May 27, 2011 16:09 UTC (Fri) by felixfix (subscriber, #242) [Link]
Out of curiosity, how much of this industrial hardware is modern enough in other respects to use a modern kernel?
Quotes of the week Posted May 27, 2011 18:17 UTC (Fri) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]
What do you mean by 'modern'?
Industrial equipment often has quite a long lifetime. I've personally worked with equipment from 70-s which used _punch_ _cards_ back in 1998.
I also personally know one system which uses ISA cards. It's a data acquisition hardware for drilling well rigs. And it's not really that old - this system was designed in 2001 and required top-notch hardware back then.
Quotes of the week Posted May 28, 2011 18:24 UTC (Sat) by mastro (subscriber, #72665) [Link]
Do you think anyone will ever install a 2.8.x kernel on it? It can continue to run with 2.6.x (or, more likely, 2.4.x) just as it has done so far.
Quotes of the week Posted May 29, 2011 12:11 UTC (Sun) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]
It's running 2.6.26 right now, so it's not inconceivable that someone might want to install 2.8 on it. For example, if new motherboards are not supported by 2.6 releases.
Quotes of the week Posted May 29, 2011 22:09 UTC (Sun) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]
Though of course, if supporting ISA is such a PITA then it should be dropped. But if it's just a cleanup for aesthetic reasons - let it stay.
Quotes of the week Posted Jun 4, 2011 13:21 UTC (Sat) by jjs (guest, #10315) [Link]
One reason HP kept MPE around so long is backwards compatability. I don't think many people (certainly not me until I got into it) realize how often stuff is used because "it's working, why change it?" - to the extent of keeping 20 year old software & hardware running an operation because it works.
Sometimes, though, they do want the latest & greatest OS for security reasons, even if the HW & SW are unchanged. Strange as it sounds, it happens.
ISA support Posted May 31, 2011 16:51 UTC (Tue) by rgmoore (✭ supporter ✭, #75) [Link] You may have ISA devices even if you don't have any ISA slots on your motherboard. Until quite recently (and possibly even still today) it's been used an on-board bus to talk to legacy devices like PS2 and serial ports and floppy controllers. I guess it was easier to include ISA support in new chipsets than to redesign those legacy devices to work with a more modern bus.
Quotes of the week Posted Jun 2, 2011 11:51 UTC (Thu) by runciter (guest, #75370) [Link] I agree. I have used PC/104 computers with serial transceiver add-on cards at work and I can say that ISA is by no means dead. On these I ran the most recent PREEMPT_RT linux, and I would be disappointed if I were prevented from using new real-time improvements because ISA support was removed.
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