Re: merging new drivers (was Re: 2.6.18 -mm merge plans)

Arjan van de Ven
2006-06-05T09:16:17Z

On Mon, 2006-06-05 at 02:10 -0700, Andrew Morton wrote:
> On Mon, 5 Jun 2006 09:59:18 +0100
> Christoph Hellwig <hch@infradead.org> wrote:
>
> > On Sun, Jun 04, 2006 at 06:47:11PM -0700, Andrew Morton wrote:
> > > Yes, I agree. As long as we reasonably think that a piece of code *will*
> > > become acceptable within a reasonable amount of time then going early is
> > > safe.
> >
> >
> > Definitly not the case for areca. The only progress at all is where people
> > like Arjan, Randy or me did very intensive babysitting. And it's still far
> > from beeing there.
> >
> > And especially in scsi land I'm absolutely against putting in more substandard
> > drivers. The subsystem is still badly plagued from lots of old drivers that
> > aren't up to any standards, and we need to decrease the maintaince load due
> > to odd drivers not increase it even further.
>
> So.. How are we going to get the Areca controllers supported in Linux?
> The code's been sitting in -mm for over a year and the vendor does have
> staff assigned to work on it.

the driver is improving for sure.

What seems to work well is when we make a work-to-do list, the vendor
then goes about and fixes most of that quite quickly. I think I'm
approaching the end of useful review input I can give (they fixed most
if not all the stuff I flagged before), it would be really nice if
Christoph or some other scsi person would do a review again and make a
list of "these should be fixed and then we can merge" (and a list of
"these can be fixed post merge" as well)