Re: [PATCH][BUGFIX] : megaraid patch for 2.10.1 (irq disable bug fix)

Matt Domsch
2004-02-24T20:34:04Z

On Tue, Feb 24, 2004 at 09:06:43AM -0600, James Bottomley wrote:
> On Tue, 2004-02-24 at 08:47, Mukker, Atul wrote:
> > We are in process of releasing a unified driver, which will natively support
> > the 2.4.x and 2.6.x kernels.
>
> I really don't think this will be such a good idea since you don't
> currently have a unified driver. 2.4 is approaching end of life as far
> as major driver updates go and the 2.6 APIs are quite a bit different.
> You'll find it's a lot of work for a driver that will carry you at most
> six months before the distributions all switch to 2.6 and you find the
> 2.4 compatibility layer to be more of a hindrance than a help.

Distributions with 2.4 kernels will continue to live on for quite a
while. Red Hat Enterprise Linux has a 5-year support life, during
which we would expect LSI to release new hardware, and we would want
to be able to have that hardware work on that OS somehow. The driver
source for 2.4 and 2.6 need not be identical, but there *will* be
ongoing maintenance for drivers on 2.4 kernels for the next several
years. We're <6 months into the RHEL3 supported lifetime.

While I understand the concerns with keeping 2.4 and 2.6 drivers
separate, we can't ignore the maintenance for 2.4 drivers. If that's
done on a 2.4-only stream, or cleanly with a joint 2.4/2.6 driver, I
don't care, but agree it's difficult to do a clean joint driver,
especially with all the SCSI subsystem changes.

Thanks,
Matt

--
Matt Domsch
Sr. Software Engineer, Lead Engineer
Dell Linux Solutions linux.dell.com & www.dell.com/linux
Linux on Dell mailing lists @ http://lists.us.dell.com