On Mon, Nov 19, 2018 at 12:52:10PM -0800, Bart Van Assche wrote: > On Mon, 2018-11-19 at 21:09 +0200, Leon Romanovsky wrote: > > The more accurate question is "how many customers ... use latest, > > upstream kernel?" > > Hi Leon, > > If this would not be clear: I am in favor of removing kernel drivers that > are no longer in use. Recently I supported a proposal to remove the SCSI > OSD driver from the kernel tree because that driver > probably has not been > used by anyone in the past five years. > > But I think that kernel drivers that are still in use should stay in the > kernel tree, no matter which version is in use. Since the Linux kernel ABI > is backwards compatible, with every Linux distro it is possible to replace > the Linux kernel that was provided by the Linux distributor with a more > recent upstream kernel. I think it would be a very unpleasant surprise for > people who use one of the RDMA adapters that only support FMR if they would > test a more recent kernel and if they would notice that its driver has been > removed. Bart, I know the theory behind promises to work on old HW, but the reality that no one really tests latest kernels on those devices. This article complains about it too: https://lwn.net/Articles/769468/ Thanks > > Bart.
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