On Fri, 2019-10-18 at 17:46 -0300, Jason Gunthorpe wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 16, 2019 at 01:47:29PM -0400, Don Dutile wrote:
>
> > Isn't there a better way to mark a driver deprecated?
> >
> > This kind of removal makes long-term maintenance of such drivers
> > painful in downstream distros, as API changes that are rippled from
> > core through all the drivers, don't update these drivers, and when
> > backporting such API changes to downstream distros, we have to +1
> > removed drivers.
>
> You still have cxg3 as an enabled & supported driver? In RH8? Why?
>
> > It's much easier if upstream continues to update the drivers for
> > such across-the-driver-patch-changes. heck, add a separate patch
> > that punches out a printk stating DEPRECATED (dropping a patch to
> > backport is easy! :) ).
>
> The whole point of doing this is to avoid this work!
People don't quit *using* hardware just because a company has quit
selling it. When we can quit supporting it is more about whether
customers ask for support (or our records indicate lots of systems use
the hardware) than about whether the vendors still care.
That said, we probably could have dropped cxgb3 from 8.0, but I'm not
positive about that. Just a guess.
--
Doug Ledford <dledford@xxxxxxxxxx>
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