On Fri, 1 Jul 2022 19:12:43 +0200 Francois Romieu wrote: > Jakub Kicinski <kuba@xxxxxxxxxx> : > > 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. > > It was used with some success in 2017: > > https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=197881 Nice find! Quoting for the list: vxge.ko can work nicely for kernel version 4.1 (I tried 4.1.44) However, for any version beyond that (I tried 4.4, 4.8, 4.13) the card can be initiated - but when I tried to do some network transfer (for example, ssh) I saw something like.... [Tx queue timeout stack trace follows] I didn't see any fixes since 2017 so the problem must still be there. Could be just a particular version of FW that's broken, tho. > > Because of the size of this driver there is a nontrivial maintenance > > cost to keeping this code around, in the last 2 years we're averaging > > more than 1 change a month. Some of which require nontrivial review > > effort, see commit 877fe9d49b74 ("Revert "drivers/net/ethernet/neterion/vxge: > > Fix a use-after-free bug in vxge-main.c"") for example. > > vxge_remove() calls vxge_device_unregister(). > > vxge_device_unregister() does unregister_netdev() + ... + free_netdev(). > > vxge_remove() keeps using netdev_priv() pointer... :o/ > > Imho it is not nontrivial enough that top-level maintainers must handle it > but it is just mvho that maintainers handle too much low-value stuff. Ack, this particular bug is just an excuse, it can be fixed. > Regarding the unused hardware side of the problem, it's a bit sad that > there still is no centralized base of interested users for a given piece > of hardware in 2022. 100%, I really wish something like that existed. I have a vague memory of Fedora or some other distro collecting HW data. Maybe it died because of privacy issues? Knowing that stuff gets used would be a great motivation. Handling all the academic / bot patches for stuff I think goes completely unused is weighing down my psyche.
