On 1/26/20 1:24 PM, Leon Romanovsky wrote:
On Sun, Jan 26, 2020 at 01:17:52PM -0800, Shannon Nelson wrote:
On 1/26/20 1:08 PM, Leon Romanovsky wrote:
The long-standing policy in kernel that we don't really care about
out-of-tree code.
That doesn't mean we need to be aggressively against out-of-tree code. One
of the positive points about Linux and loadable modules has always been the
flexibility that allows and encourages innovation, and helps enable more
work and testing before a driver can become a fully-fledged part of the
kernel. This move actively discourages part of that flexibility and I think
it is breaking part of the usefulness of modules.
You are mixing definitions, nothing stops those people to innovate and
develop their code inside kernel and as standalone modules too.
It just stops them to put useless driver version string inside ethtool.
If they feel that their life can't be without something from 90s, they
have venerable MODULE_VERSION() macro to print anything they want.
Part of the pain of supporting our users is getting them to give us
useful information about their problem. The more commands I need them
to run to get information about the environment, the less likely I will
get anything useful. We've been training our users over the years to
use "ethtool -i" to get a good chunk of that info, with the knowledge
that the driver version is only a hint, based upon the distro involved.
I don't want to lose that hint. If anything, I'd prefer that we added a
field for UTS_RELEASE in the ethtool output, but I know that's too much
to ask.
If the driver can put its "useless" version info into the
MODULE_VERSION, why is it not acceptable for the ethtool driver version
field?
... and as beauty is in the eye of the beholder, a judgement of
"useless" is a personal thing. Personally, I find it the driver version
useful.
sln
