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If dropping support for older hardware allows v7 to be developed faster, are we okay with that?

Absolutely.
8 (50%)
I'd need to know what devices would be affected.
6 (38%)
No way-My RB750's will outlive me.
2 (13%)
 
Total votes: 16
 
Swordforthelord
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Legacy Routerboard Support

Mon Aug 08, 2022 5:47 pm

The longevity of Routerboards from a software support perspective is, in my experience, unparalleled. I love that I can take an RB411 running v3 and upgrade it all the way to v7. However, I have to ask myself, is this level of long term support placing handcuffs on the developers? If dropping support for older hardware or abandoned or seldom used architectures (like PPC and SMIPS) allowed the development of v7 to accelerate, is that a sacrifice we're willing to make?
 
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Re: Legacy Routerboard Support

Mon Aug 08, 2022 9:41 pm

So are we giving up on one of MikroTik's strengths?

Or now there is another person who joins the list of those who know for sure how MikroTik manages the internal staff,
another successful manager who with his international company knows how to instruct MikroTik how things must be done.
 
Swordforthelord
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Re: Legacy Routerboard Support

Tue Aug 09, 2022 12:58 am

So are we giving up on one of MikroTik's strengths?

Or now there is another person who joins the list of those who know for sure how MikroTik manages the internal staff,
another successful manager who with his international company knows how to instruct MikroTik how things must be done.
I don't know the ins and outs of how Mikrotik does things, how they allocate their resources, or what color the floors are in their offices. Coincidentally, neither do you. I do know that their resources are not infinite. Logically, no longer having to support an enormous amount of devices that were discontinued years ago would expedite their software development process. The question is, would the gains be worth the cost?

I'm not criticising. I never said they were wrong to do A, B, and C. I'm just exploring possibilities. Go be angry somewhere else.
 
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Re: Legacy Routerboard Support

Tue Aug 09, 2022 1:03 am

I guess MIPS is still going to be supported for a while...

see the new 100G switches, powered by a qca9531, which is architecturally extremelly similar to a RB411 from 2009

i could imagine driver support for very old wifi cards being deprecated, but as far as the routerboards go, the work to support RB411/433, etc in ROS7 is already done to support MIPS hardware released in 2022...
 
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Re: Legacy Routerboard Support

Tue Aug 09, 2022 5:12 am

What is your definition of "old devices"?
 
Swordforthelord
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Re: Legacy Routerboard Support

Tue Aug 09, 2022 8:19 am

What is your definition of "old devices"?
I don't have a specific definition. If Mikrotik were to adopt such a policy, they'd be best suited to determine which discontinued devices are creating the greatest drag on the software development process.
I can't help but notice though that they no longer make any PPC devices and I don't think they have for years. Dropping support for those would eliminate an entire CPU architecture they currently have to test and produce packages for.
There are boards they currently support that have been around since long before I even knew Mikrotik existed. I started off installing RB750's; those have been around since 2009, possibly longer. Is it amazing that I can still install the latest ROS version on them? Absolutely. Would I understand if they decided it was no longer practical to make this possible? Absolutely.
 
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Re: Legacy Routerboard Support

Tue Aug 09, 2022 10:41 am

If Mikrotik were to adopt such a policy, they'd be best suited to determine which discontinued devices are creating the greatest drag on the software development process.
If.. If.. If.. If.. If.. If.. If..
 
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Re: Legacy Routerboard Support

Tue Aug 09, 2022 10:43 am

I wish they'd ditch the deprecated L2TP and PPTP, the troublemaker "OVPN" because they spend too much time fixing bugs in it / implementing new features, I might add other stuff in the future here.
 
Swordforthelord
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Re: Legacy Routerboard Support

Tue Aug 09, 2022 6:07 pm

If Mikrotik were to adopt such a policy, they'd be best suited to determine which discontinued devices are creating the greatest drag on the software development process.
If.. If.. If.. If.. If.. If.. If..
You've made it very clear, not once but twice, that you're unwilling to contribute anything of any value or substance to this thread. It's shocking to me that you're a moderator when you drop into random threads just to spew your negativity.
 
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Re: Legacy Routerboard Support

Tue Aug 09, 2022 6:18 pm

random threads
I completely subscribe to this definition for this thread.

Anything I, you, or anyone else that has nothing to do with MikroTik, will produce absolutely nothing constructive.
Because you can't teach others to do their job for two reason: you don't do that job, they do their job as they please.
Get hired at MikroTik and maybe they take what you say into consideration.

An example for all:
Users have been complaining for months that the BGP is not complete,
and it seems to you that they have prioritized this???
But who are we to try and guess what's going on inside?
Maybe they have 100 people working on BGP, what do we know?

It takes the time it takes.
 
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Re: Legacy Routerboard Support

Tue Aug 09, 2022 6:47 pm

random threads
Anything I, you, or anyone else that has nothing to do with MikroTik, will produce absolutely nothing constructive.
You're a cynic, I get that. Yet you're a terribly proactive one. You see my thread, you feel it has no value, but instead of ignoring it, you go out of your way to dump on it. Why?
random threads
But who are we to try and guess what's going on inside?
I will do all the guessing I please, thank you very much.
 
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Re: Legacy Routerboard Support

Tue Aug 09, 2022 7:44 pm

(just for be clear, I used "we", not "you")

Don't worry, don't bother you any more. (of course it also depends on what you write)

Please, if I am not acting at "that moment" as a moderator, but am writing what I think, like everyone else, at that moment do not consider me a moderator.
 
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Re: Legacy Routerboard Support

Wed Aug 10, 2022 12:25 am

WinBox and "infinite" (*1) updates is why I and surely many others like RouterOS, so be careful with that. :)

It would be interesting to know how much work each part is. It seems to me that once a device model gets going, it shouldn't require much further care for itself. Not counting dealing with past mistakes like 16MB flash with 32MB RAM (hAP mini/lite), where they already had to remove some stuff to keep it upgradeable. But they still sell them, so clearly it makes sense to them. Most stuff should not be device or architecture dependent (when it's either in userspace or using common code in kernel). And when something is, I'd expect it to be mainly the newer specialized things like HW acceleration of different things. In case it's something not already existing in Linux, it could complicate kernel upgrades, but it doesn't happen very often.

Of course there is some extra work, at least with testing different devices, but I'm pretty sure it's done by different people, not developers. I seriously doubt that dropping support for e.g. PPC architecture would significantly speed up development.

As for dropping some features, I don't think it would help much either. Sure, PPTP is deprecated, but it's not like developers spend too much time (if any) on it lately. They spend some on OpenVPN from time to time, but probably not that much either. And it mostly works (if you can live with existing limitations), so why get rid of it? Nobody knows how many customers are happy to have it. Probably more than just a few.

--
(*1) My mipsle museum is very sad for being left out. But realistically, RB1xx were already getting too slow when support ended, so it wasn't too big loss. But RB5xx could still go for a while. It would be also interesting to know what exactly led to this decision, it seemed sudden and unexpected.

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