AFAIK the answer to DVB support in RouterOS is already “no”.
What I sense is that the more drivers are included in RouterOS, the harder it is to keep it reliable and stable - same in any OS I think.
And of course, the code footprint gets bigger.
I think that 90%+ of the users would vote for “stability” and “performance” over feature-extensions.
Perhaps the right path would be a separate build of software just to support things people have asked for like DVB and ADSL, ethernet ports and some basic routing. “one build fits all” in RouterOS is probably not going to happen, or even a good idea.
If you have DVB up and running on a redhat box, perhaps it’s time to do some “pruning” and get it down to <1MB to run from flash.
Elsewhere [for a completely different reason], we did this with Windows and got the OS plus our own applications cut down to <256MB, still with >70MB free for log files etc, and disk-cache turned off to avoid burning out the Flash. It’s possible to go a lot smaller too. I think a Linux guru should be able to do similar. You might miss the lovely GUI we have in RouterOS though …
What you say sounds reasonable about limiting the drivers but then why do MT not remove some of the old drivers for interfaces that have not been available for years?
Sure I guess they could remove old drivers and make the code smaller.
But as I understand it, it’s adding in new drivers that can “break” the O/S - thinks like causing memory leaks, instabilities elsewhere, etc.
I guess a Linux guru would explain better than me, but the Windows analogy is not bad - think of all those horrible 3rd party drivers that never seem to work together reliably - or adding just one more in messes an otherwise fine installation up.
plus we have to add a configuration menu, make sure it all works, test it (we have to have this card for that), make sure this does not break a ton of other features, test it again, etc.
these dvb interfaces have huge and complex configuration settings. and we have no way to test it.
I understand not supporting the DVB but I still don’t under stand not supporting a miniPCI ADSL card. Cisco routers and a lot of others support DSL moduels.
But if it would make the support too hard and other things suffer, then no extra interfaces is just fine with me! )