Re: [PATCH] staging: Revert "staging: qlge: Retire the driver"

[Benjamin Poirier <benjamin.poirier@gmail.com>]

On 2023-10-30 16:25 +0100, Greg Kroah-Hartman wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 31, 2023 at 02:04:00AM +1100, Benjamin Poirier wrote:
> > This reverts commit 875be090928d19ff4ae7cbaadb54707abb3befdf.
> > 
> > On All Hallows' Eve, fear and cower for it is the return of the undead
> > driver.
> > 
> > There was a report [1] from a user of a QLE8142 device. They would like for
> > the driver to remain in the kernel. Therefore, revert the removal of the
> > qlge driver.
> > 
> > [1] https://lore.kernel.org/netdev/566c0155-4f80-43ec-be2c-2d1ad631bf25@gmail.com/
> 
> Who's going to maintain this?

I was planning to update the MAINTAINERS entry to
S:	Orphan
when moving it back to drivers/net/. Would you prefer that I do that
change in a second patch right after the revert in staging? That would
certainly make things clearer.

> > Reported by: Kira <nyakov13@gmail.com>
> > Signed-off-by: Benjamin Poirier <benjamin.poirier@gmail.com>
> > ---
> > 
> > Notes:
> >     Once the removal and revert show up in the net-next tree, I plan to send a
> >     followup patch to move the driver to drivers/net/ as discussed earlier:
> >     https://lore.kernel.org/netdev/20231019074237.7ef255d7@kernel.org/
> 
> are you going to be willing to maintain this and keep it alive?

No.

> I'm all this, if you want to, but I would like it out of staging.  So

I'd like it out of staging as well. Since nobody wants to maintain it, I
think it should be deleted. However, my understanding is that Jakub is
willing to take it back into drivers/net/ as-is given that there is at
least one user. Jakub, did I understand that correctly?

> how about applying this, and a follow-on one that moves it there once
> -rc1 is out?  And it probably should be in the 'net' tree, as you don't
> want 6.7 to come out without the driver at all, right?

Right about making sure 6.7 includes the driver. The 'net' tree is
usually for fixes hence why I would send to net-next. So the driver
would still be in staging for 6.7 (if you include the revert in your
6.7-rc1 submission) and would be back in drivers/net/ for 6.8.

> > +QLOGIC QLGE 10Gb ETHERNET DRIVER
> > +M:	Manish Chopra <manishc@marvell.com>
> > +M:	GR-Linux-NIC-Dev@marvell.com
> > +M:	Coiby Xu <coiby.xu@gmail.com>
> > +L:	netdev@vger.kernel.org
> > +S:	Supported
> > +F:	Documentation/networking/device_drivers/qlogic/qlge.rst
> > +F:	drivers/staging/qlge/
> 
> It's obvious taht these people are not maintaining this code, so they
> should be dropped from the MAINTAINERS file as well.

I agree.