Cc: Jeff Garzik <jeff@...>, Matthew Wilcox <matthew@...>, Linux Kernel Mailing List <linux-kernel@...>, NetDev <netdev@...>, e1000-list <e1000-devel@...>, linux-pci maillist <linux-pci@...>, Andrew Morton <akpm@...>, David S. Miller <davem@...>, Linus Torvalds <torvalds@...>, Jesse Brandeburg <jesse.brandeburg@...>, Ronciak, John <john.ronciak@...>, Allan, Bruce W <bruce.w.allan@...>, Greg KH <greg@...>, Arjan van de Ven <arjan@...>, Rafael J. Wysocki <rjw@...>
why you want to cripple an existing, rather well working and popular
Linux driver is beyond me.
You have a wide array of measures if you want to migrate users to the
new and shiny e1000e driver: you can stop adding _new_ IDs to the old
driver, you can unsupport it, you can claim that it wont work in certain
situations, you can print out messages to the user in the dmesg (if
those messages are true), you can even remove IDs from it if the user
has the new driver enabled.
But what you cannot do is to intentionally cripple a popular driver.
It's plain stupid. It does not matter how many times you've announced
it, it's still madness. Unless your goal is to reduce the Linux userbase
as quickly as possible that is ... ;-)
And please understand: _you_ are the maintainer of this code so
_please_, if you wish to do so, solve the problem differently, but dont
just stand there _talking_. I gave you ample feedback about what the
problem is (which you initially denied to even exist) and i even wrote a
patch. You might never use e1000=y && e1000e=m or e1000=y && e1000e=n
but i do. Guys, the ball is in your court now.
huh? How can you claim that?? It definitely solved my problem. Did you
miss that aspect of my patch?
... and not changing existing behavior for a perfectly well working
system is exactly what compatibility and smooth migration is about. New
drivers need several kernel releases to be fully known, to be fully
trusted and to be fully accepted and integrated - and not the least, to
be fully tested ...
These are all well-known principles. It's nothing new at all and there's
nothing special about it: dont break existing drivers and setups and
dont create silent side-effects between drivers.
Ingo
--