On Tue, 9 Apr 2024 15:11:21 +0200 Alexander Lobakin wrote: > BTW idpf is also not something you can go and buy in a store, but it's > here in the kernel. Anyway, see below. For some definition of "a store" :) > > Could you please describe in details and examples what exactly is we > > are about to loose? I don't see it. > > As long as driver A introduces new features / improvements / API / > whatever to the core kernel, we benefit from this no matter whether I'm > actually able to run this driver on my system. > > Some drivers even give us benefit by that they are of good quality (I > don't speak for this driver, just some hypothetical) and/or have > interesting design / code / API / etc. choices. The drivers I work on > did gain a lot just from that I was reading new commits / lore threads > and look at changes in other drivers. Another point along these lines is worth bringing up. Companies which build their own kernels probably have little reason to distribute drivers out of tree. Vendors unfortunately are forced by some of their customers and/or sales department to provide out of tree drivers. Which in turn distinctiveness them from implementing shared core infrastructure. The queue API is a good example of that. Number of vendors implement pre-allocate and swap for reconfiguration but it's not controlled by the core. So after 5+ years (look at netconf 2019 slides) of violently agreeing that we need queue alloc we made little progress :( I don't think that it's a coincidence that it's Mina (Google) and David (Meta) who picked up this work. And it's really hard to implement that in an "off the shelf device", where queues are fully controlled by FW (no documentation available), and without breaking something (no access to vendor's CI/tests). IOW while modifying core for a single private driver is a concern there's also a ton of work we all agree needs to be done in the core, that we need help with.
