From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Patrick McHardy Subject: Re: Fwd: [ofa-general] FW: QLogic vNIC Kernel Submission Date: Tue, 17 Jun 2008 21:15:08 +0200 Message-ID: <48580D3C.2070308@trash.net> References: <99863D2ED484D449811D97A4C44C9CBD7C50F7@EPEXCH2.qlogic.org> <485803D3.5020505@trash.net> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-15; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Cc: netdev@vger.kernel.org, rdreier@cisco.com, Ramachandra K , poornima.kamath@qlogic.com To: Amar Mudrankit Return-path: Received: from stinky.trash.net ([213.144.137.162]:40067 "EHLO stinky.trash.net" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1755327AbYFQTPK (ORCPT ); Tue, 17 Jun 2008 15:15:10 -0400 In-Reply-To: <485803D3.5020505@trash.net> Sender: netdev-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: Patrick McHardy wrote: > Amar Mudrankit wrote: >> It looks as if my original email was "scrubbed" before it made the >> mailing list so I am resending it... >> >> QLogic has been attempting to submit our virtual NIC (vNIC) driver to >> the Linux kernel for several months. We have made changes to the code >> based on the feedback we have received over four rounds of >> submissions. Among the feedback we received during this process was a >> request to alter our code to use a single value per file for >> configuration of our driver through sysfs interface. After spending >> much time and effort to complete this change to our design we >> re-submitted the driver only to receive a response suggesting that we >> change once again from this interface to a different API interface >> called rtnl_link. Needless to say I am very frustrated with this >> process. This new API interface would require substantial changes to >> our code. > > Thats one of the reasons why it should be done before merging it. > The other one being that an API can't be removed easily once its > in the kernel. Besides that, the state machine triggered device registration and the sysfs based checksumming settings of also need to go (both should be about 5 minutes of work by the way).