ajdJun 19, 2024
kernel friends: what's your preferred strategy for announcing to users that you're deprecating a driver and plan to remove it soon?
Show threadThorsten Leemhuis (acct. 1/4)Jun 19, 2024

@ajd

sometimes I think playing some tricks with a new or changed config option might be a good idea, as then people that run oldconfig will notice it.

other times I think "introducing delays on driver load that get longer with every new version coupled with a warning in the log" could help, as people then will investigate.

But I'm pretty sure Linus would hate such games and yell at people that try them. 🥴

Show threadajdJun 19, 2024
@kernellogger yes this what I've been discussing with @mpe. imho it would be nice if kbuild provided some explicit attribute we could add to label which would have standardised warning behaviour so that one does not have to think very hard about how to do it
Show threadajdJun 19, 2024
@kernellogger @mpe I'm going to add a warning message on driver probe but I don't think my users need surprising trickery at runtime ;)
Show threadGreg K-HJun 19, 2024
@ajd @kernellogger @mpe That implies that you actually have users of the driver. If so, why delete it?
Show threadajd
@gregkh @kernellogger @mpe I strongly suspect there are ~0 users who will be impacted by the removal of this driver from upstream by the time I eventually get around to ripping everything out. my confidence not being 100% I'd like to responsibly warn people
Jun 19, 2024 at 1:33pmWeb