Re: [PATCH net-next 0/7] Remove three Sun net drivers

Anirudh Venkataramanan
2023-01-07T02:05:07Z

On 1/6/2023 5:36 PM, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:
> Hello!
>
> On 1/6/23 23:00, Anirudh Venkataramanan wrote:
>> This series removes the Sun Cassini, LDOM vswitch and sunvnet drivers.
>
> This would affect a large number of Linux on SPARC users. Please don't!

Thanks for chiming in. Does your statement above apply to all 3 drivers?

>
> We're still maintaining an active sparc64 port for Debian, see [1]. So
> does Gentoo [2].
>
>> In a recent patch series that touched these drivers [1], it was suggested
>> that these drivers should be removed completely. git logs suggest that
>> there hasn't been any significant feature addition, improvement or fixes
>> to user-visible bugs in a while. A web search didn't indicate any recent
>> discussions or any evidence that there are users out there who care about
>> these drivers.
>
> Well, these drivers just work and I don't see why there should be regular
> discussions about them or changes.

That's fair, but lack of discussion can also be signs of disuse, and
that's really the hunch I was following up on. Given what you and Karl
have said, I agree that we shouldn't remove these drivers. I'll stop
pursuing this unless there are new arguments to the contrary.

Ani