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 threadmpe
@gregkh @kernellogger @ajd As far as we know there are no users - all the usual signals are blank (eg. bug reports etc.) @ajd also checked via IBM channels and got no signs of life. The driver has hooks into core arch code, so it's not the kind of driver we can maintain indefinitely at zero cost. But we don't want to just tear it out, on the off chance there is some user somewhere we don't know about.
Jun 20, 2024 at 12:41amWeb