Cc: Stephen Hemminger <shemminger@...>, Kyle Rose <krose@...>, James Corey <ploversegg@...>, Rob Sims <lkml-z@...>, <linux-kernel@...>, Jeff Garzik <jeff@...>, <netdev@...>
Sorry for a long answer, I'm trying to provide insight on two recent cases.
Thinking back to several drivers, when e100 was new I tried it because I
had problems with eepro100 in the area of multiple cards, multiple
cables on a single card, and jumbo packets. For a while I used both,
until e100 worked where I need it. So I initially tried it because it
had features I needed, and then dropped to older driver just to avoid
having to decide.
With sk98lin, the driver worked flawlessly with all (3-4) systems, so I
had no reason to try any other. When removing sk98lin was first
proposed, I tried skge, first measurements showed it was 5-8% slower,
NOT what I want, so I went back. For me there was no reliability issue,
but I never tried it in a system with more than on NIC on the driver.
Would "it's a little slower" be a valid bug report? Or would I have
gotten "works fine for me" from people not beating it over Gbit? I
didn't try sky2 until you suggested it, and I have reported my results
previously, just stops working. Could it be my hardware? I tried it on
one system, so yes, but sk98lin works for months.
So if you want people to try a new driver, I think it really has to have
some benefits to the users, in terms of performance, reliability, or
features. "Cleaner design" doesn't motivate, and it does raise the
question of why the old driver wasn't just cleaned up. I've been doing
software for decades, I appreciate why, but users in general just want
to use their system. Which raises the question of why to delete drivers
which work for many or even most users? Testing a new kernel is no
longer a drop in a boot operation if modprobe.conf must be edited to get
the network up, and the typical user isn't going to write that shell
script to try one or the other driver.
Honestly, new drivers which offer little benefit to most users are the
exception rather than the rule, so this may a corner case I would like
to see sk98lin back in the kernel, for a while I can build my own
kernels and patch it in, but until other drivers are drop-in, I probably
won't change.
Separate but related: why keep skge and sky2? Are we going through this
again in a year? Is the benefit worth the effort?
Hope some of this is helpful.
--
bill davidsen <davidsen@tmr.com>
CTO TMR Associates, Inc
Doing interesting things with small computers since 1979
-
