I think I was actually the last person to touch it ;)
Well, it's not necessarily broken, it's just a different model. At some
point the cost of maintaining a whole suite of virtual drivers becomes
greater than leveraging a bunch of legacy drivers. If you can eliminate
most of the performance cost of that by changing something at a layer
below (port I/O), it is a win even if it is not a perfect solution.
But I think I've lost the argument anyways; it doesn't seem to be for
the greater good of Linux, and there are alternatives we can take.
Unfortunately for me, they require a lot more work.
Zach
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