Re: [PATCH] net: Add support for handling queueing in hardware

[Guenter Roeck <linux@roeck-us.net>]

On Fri, Mar 22, 2013 at 06:08:40PM -0400, Theodore Ts'o wrote:
> On Fri, Mar 22, 2013 at 11:39:20AM -0400, Ben Collins wrote:
> > 
> > If your company had hardware going to production, you'd want it supported in mainline too, I suspect.
> 
> And if companies told their hardware partners that they will drop use
> of their hardware in future products unless they get their !@#@S
> drivers upstream, I'd bet they'd change their engineering priorities
> so they would work on it, instead of foisting this work on their
> customers.
> 
I would love to be in that position. However, the decision to choose
a specific chip is not always coordinated with those who have to provide
the software to run on those chips.

> I've seen this work in enterprise computing, where the RFP had
> requirements for upstream drivers (i.e., if you want your 10gig
> ethernet NIC to be used in HP or IBM's servers, get the darned thing
> upstream!).  The trick is making it clear that selection of components
> depends not just on an OSS driver, but an OSS driver which has been
> accepted upstream (which also helps from a quality-of-code
> requirement).
> 
> I've been waiting for this to start happening in the consumer
> electronics/embedded world, but it's been slow coming,
> unfortunately....
> 
The same applies to vendors of non-consumer network devices, unfortunately.

Guenter