On Sun, Jan 26, 2020 at 02:57:21PM -0800, Shannon Nelson wrote: > On 1/26/20 2:22 PM, Michal Kubecek wrote: > > On Sun, Jan 26, 2020 at 02:12:38PM -0800, Shannon Nelson wrote: > > > 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. > > So as I suggested elsewhere, can we compromise by not bashing the driver > string in the caller stack, but require the in-kernel drivers to use a > particular macro that will put the kernel/git version into the string? This > allows out-of-tree drivers the option of overriding the version with some > other string that can be meaningful in any other given old or new distro > kernel. This should be easy to enforce mechanically with checkpatch, and > easy enough to do a sweeping coccinelle change on the existing drivers. Personally, I rather liked what Jakub suggested earlier: set ethtool_drvinfo::version to kernel version before ops->get_drvinfo() is called in ethtool_get_drvinfo() (and its netlink counterpart once we get some consensus about what information should be in the message), clean up in-tree drivers so that they don't touch it and add a coccinelle check so that we keep in-tree drivers compliant; this would allow out-of-tree drivers to overwrite ethtool_drvinfo::version with whatever they want. Michal
