Re: [net-next] i40iw/i40e: Remove link dependency on i40e

[Jason Gunthorpe <jgg@mellanox.com>]

On Wed, May 23, 2018 at 08:03:44AM -0700, Alexander Duyck wrote:
> On Tue, May 22, 2018 at 11:19 PM, Christoph Hellwig <hch@infradead.org> wrote:
> > On Tue, May 22, 2018 at 02:04:06PM -0700, Jeff Kirsher wrote:
> >> > Why would you want to do this? The rdma driver is non-functional
> >> > without the ethernet driver, so why on earth would we want to defeat
> >> > the module dependency mechanism?
> >>
> >> This change is driven by the OSV's like Red Hat, where customer's were
> >> updating the i40e driver, which in turn broke i40iw.
> >
> > Doctor it hurts when I do this..
> >
> > There is no reason to make a mess of our drivers because people are
> > doing things they should haver never done and that aren't supported
> > in Linux.
> >
> > If Intel didn;t offer any out of tree drivers I'm pretty sure no
> > customer would even attempt this.  So fix this where the problem is.
> 
> Are you serious? You are never going to see out-of-tree drivers go
> away. They exist for the simple reason that most customers/OSVs are
> slow to upgrade their kernels so we have people running on a 3.10
> something kernel on their RHEL 7.X and want to use the latest greatest
> hardware.

So provide the i40iw module when providing the i40e upgrade module?

I still can't understand why this is a problem that needs to be
solved in mainline, or why it deserves a special and unique fix to
i40e, or even what the *actual* problem is..

Jason