You mean never ever remove PCI-E support from e1000?
Won't that will inflict long term headaches on the people that matter
most -- users and maintainers -- to avoid short term headaches for
kernel power users?
To review the overall situation,
* e1000 supports so many chips, that making a change for new hardware in
e1000 involves breaking stability of older chips
* //You know this// from past kernel history, when late-breaking e1000
changes for new hardware wound up breaking working setups on multiple
occasions
* There is 100% agreement that e1000 is a maintenance nightmare, from
the people who actually touch the code (or even read it).
* Therefore, e1000e receives new h/w support and new devel, leaving
e1000 to sit and be stable
However, due to a mistake now released to the public -- a tiny few PCI-E
chips are supported by e1000 -- you have a widely disparate feature set:
e1000, old chips: full support
e1000, a few PCI-E chips: basic support
e1000e, all PCI-E chips: full support
Since e1000e is all new and fancy AND CLEAN, the code for the same chips
is different -- thus Intel must make every PCI-E fix _twice_.
It also means WE HAVE TO KEEP TOUCHING E1000, while supporting PCI-E
chips. After this PCI-E issue is resolved, I want to let e1000 sit and
be stable and not be touched.
For a temporary situation, this is fine. Give me transition
suggestions, please!
For a permanent situation, that sucks.
Distros will ship e1000 sans PCI-E support, which means you are asking
that PCI-E support be maintained indefinitely, purely for the few kernel
hackers that still use it?
I __don't care__ how we get there, but a permanent situation where e1000
continues to support a few PCI-E chips in basic mode seems the least
desireable of all available options.
Wait six months? Sure. Whatever. As long as we get to where we can
disable PCI-E support in e1000.
Jeff
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