On 9/28/2019 1:55 AM, Leon Romanovsky wrote:
On Fri, Sep 27, 2019 at 04:17:15PM -0400, Doug Ledford wrote:
On Thu, 2019-09-26 at 21:55 +0200, gregkh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
On Thu, Sep 26, 2019 at 07:49:44PM +0000, Saleem, Shiraz wrote:
Subject: Re: [RFC 20/20] RDMA/i40iw: Mark i40iw as deprecated
On Thu, Sep 26, 2019 at 09:45:19AM -0700, Jeff Kirsher wrote:
From: Shiraz Saleem <shiraz.saleem@xxxxxxxxx>
Mark i40iw as deprecated/obsolete.
irdma is the replacement driver that supports X722.
Can you simply delete old one and add MODULE_ALIAS() in new
driver?
Yes, but we thought typically driver has to be deprecated for a few
cycles before removing it.
If you completely replace it with something that works the same, why
keep the old one around at all?
Unless you don't trust your new code? :)
I have yet to see, in over 20 years of kernel experience, a new driver
replace an old driver and not initially be more buggy and troublesome
than the old driver. It takes time and real world usage for the final
issues to get sorted out. During that time, the fallback is often
necessary for those real world users.
How many real users exist in RDMA world who run pure upstream kernel?
I doubt too many especially the latest bleeding edge upstream kernel.
That could be interesting, but I don't think it's the reality.
Distro kernels could certainly still keep the old driver, and that makes
a lot of sense.
-Denny
