Re: [rdma-next v2 07/23] RDMA/core: Remove unimplemented node_types and node transport

[Leon Romanovsky <leon-DgEjT+Ai2ygdnm+yROfE0A@public.gmane.org>]

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On Wed, Aug 16, 2017 at 02:30:05PM +0000, Suri Shelvapille wrote:
> Leon:
> Our Drivers are not in Kernel (being a small company we don't have resources to make it in-kernel). When I and Hal worked on adding the switch capability into the kernel, we thought it would be useful for the community (as there was interest in a few others besides us). Philosophically, since SWITCH and ROUTER definitions are part of the IB spec, don't you think having these definitions makes the kernel close to spec and hence useful? I know these definitions can be easily added into our drivers.
> Just treat this as a request, if it is not an onus to the community, please keep the SWITCH and ROUTER (only) definitions. If you have strong reasons I have no objections to your patches.

It looks like I need to explain the rationale why I did this patch.

RDMAtool presents various information from the kernel, one of such info
is the node_type. In order to correctly present it, I was asked to expose
possible node_types through UAPI files.

These files are done with extra care and my goal was to provide the minimal
set and the most cleanest exposure, so I cleaned everything in those paths,
from the lowest possible layer to highest possible layer.

One of such cleanups were removal of node_types fields, which don't have
in-kernel users and against software development principles - don't
leave dead code.

So for now, I'm leaving this patch as is.

It is far below my lowest quality bar to leave those fields in place,
but if members of RDMA community prefer to go such low, they should
speak and explain publicly why RDMA subsystem is different from the
rest of the kernel.

Thanks

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