Fri, Jul 01, 2022 at 03:17:32PM CEST, equinox@xxxxxxxxxx wrote: >[culled Cc:] > >On Fri, Jul 01, 2022 at 12:34:13PM +0200, Jiri Pirko wrote: >> Fri, Jul 01, 2022 at 06:42:34AM CEST, kuba@xxxxxxxxxx wrote: >> >The last meaningful change to this driver was made by Jon in 2011. >> >As much as we'd like to believe that this is because the code is >> >perfect the chances are nobody is using this hardware. >> >> Hmm, I can understand what for driver for HW that is no longer >> developed, the driver changes might be very minimal. The fact that the >> code does not change for years does not mean that there are users of >> this NIC which this patch would break :/ > >As a "reference datapoint", I'm a user that was affected by the removal >of the Mellanox SwitchX-2 driver about a year ago. But that was a bit You could not be. There was really no functionality implemented in switchx2 driver. I doubt you used 32x40G port switch with slow-path forwarding through kernel with total max bandwidth of like 1-2G for the whole switch :) >different since the driver was apparently rather incomplete (I don't >know the details, was still messing around to even get things going.) > >(FWIW my use case is in giving old hardware a second life, in this case >completely throwing away the PowerPC control board from Mellanox SX6000 >series switches and replacing it with a new custom CPU board... I might >well be the only person interested in that driver. > >> Isn't there some obsoletion scheme globally applied to kernel device >> support? I would expect something like that. > >I have the same question - didn't see any such policy but didn't look >particularly hard. But would like to avoid putting time into making >something work just to have the kernel driver yanked shortly after :) > > >-David
