Re: [PATCH V3 2/5] misc: mlx5ctl: Add mlx5ctl misc driver

Jakub Kicinski
2023-12-05T02:52:14Z

On Mon, 4 Dec 2023 15:37:56 -0600 Aron Silverton wrote:
> > To Jakub's point, no, we don't care about enterprise distros, they are a
> > consumer of our releases and while some of them pay the salaries of our
> > developers, they really don't have much influence over our development
> > rules as they are just so far behind in releases that their releases
> > look nothing like what we do in places (i.e. Linux "like" just like many
> > Android systems.)
> >
> > If the enterprise distros pop in here and give us their opinions of the
> > patchset, I would GREATLY appreciate it, as having more people review
> > code at this point in time would be most helpful instead of having to
> > hear about how the interfaces are broken 2 years from now.
>
> We will be happy to test and review v4 of this series.
>
> Fully interactive debugging has become essential to getting to the root
> cause of complex issues that arise between the types of devices being
> discussed and their interactions with various software layers. Turning
> knobs and dumping registers just isn't sufficient, and I wish we'd had
> this capability long ago.

Could you shed some light on what issues you were debugging, broadly?

> Our customers have already benefited from the interactive debugging
> capability that these patches provide, but the full potential won't be
> realized until this is upstream.

Can you elaborate on why "full potential won't be realized until this
is upstream"? The driver looks very easy to ship as a standalone module.