On Sun, Jan 26, 2020 at 02:12:38PM -0800, Shannon Nelson wrote: > 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. At the same time, I've been trying to explain both our L1/L2 support guys and our customers that "driver version" information reported by "ethtool -i" is almost useless and that if they really want to identify driver version, they should rather use srcversion as reported by modinfo or sysfs. Michal
