Re: [net-next PATCH 00/15] eth: fbnic: Add network driver for Meta Platforms Host Network Interface

Jiri Pirko
2024-04-08T11:37:08Z

Fri, Apr 05, 2024 at 09:11:19AM CEST, pabeni@redhat.com wrote:
>On Thu, 2024-04-04 at 17:11 -0700, Alexander Duyck wrote:
>> Again, I would say we look at the blast radius. That is how we should
>> be measuring any change. At this point the driver is self contained
>> into /drivers/net/ethernet/meta/fbnic/. It isn't exporting anything
>> outside that directory, and it can be switched off via Kconfig.
>
>I personally think this is the most relevant point. This is just a new
>NIC driver, completely self-encapsulated. I quickly glanced over the

What do you mean by "self contained/encapsulated"? You are not using
any API outside the driver? Every driver API change that this NIC
is going to use is a burden. I did my share of changes like that in
the past so I have pretty good notion how painful it often is.

>code and it looks like it's not doing anything obviously bad. It really
>looks like an usual, legit, NIC driver.
>
>I don't think the fact that the NIC itself is hard to grasp for anyone

Distinguish "hard"/"impossible".

>outside <organization> makes a difference. Long time ago Greg noted
>that drivers has been merged for H/W known to have a _single_ existing
>instance (IIRC, I can't find the reference on top of my head, but back
>then was quite popular, I hope some other old guy could remember).
>
>To me, the maintainership burden is on Meta: Alex/Meta will have to
>handle bug report, breakages, user-complains (I guess this last would
>be the easier part ;). If he/they will not cope with the process we can
>simply revert the driver. I would be quite surprised if such situation
>should happen, but the impact from my PoV looks minimal.
>
>TL;DR: I don't see any good reason to not accept this - unless my quick
>glance was too quick and very wrong, but it looks like other has
>similar view.

Do you actually see any good reason to accept this? I mean, really,
could you spell out at least one benefit it brings for non-Meta user?
I see only gains for Meta and losses for the community.