[patch 00/54] [Announce] Microsoft Hyper-V drivers for Linux

[Jan Engelhardt]

On Monday 2009-07-20 18:00, Greg Kroah-Hartman wrote:
>
>I'm happy to announce, that after many months of discussions, Microsoft
>has released their Hyper-V Linux drivers under the GPLv2.  Following
>this message, will be the patches that add the drivers to the
>drivers/staging/ tree, and a whole bunch of cleanups.
>
>It's taken a long road to get here, and I'd like to thank the following
>people who made this possible:
>  - Steve Hemminger for the initial prodding and extreme patience
>  - Hank Janssen for providing the code and working with me to get it
>    into a workable and semi-mergable state.  His involvement within
>    Microsoft was also invaluable.
>  - Sam Ramji for his push within Microsoft to make this happen in a
>    manner that works with the Linux community.
>  - Novell for sponsoring my work on the Linux Driver project, without
>    which, this would not have even been possible.

(Your title as Maintainer of Crap has been well earned. But crap
should not be maintained, it should be improved.)


I took a random patch to look at
(add-the-hyper-v-virtual-network-driver.patch to be precise). I think
the /hv/ subdirectory name should be expanded a little (to, say,
/hyper-v/); we're not in the Unix days anymore where space is at such
a premium that people even strip the last e off /usr. Our wireless
drivers also don't live in /wl/. And since hv does not seem to be
related to a hypervisor — cf. sunhv.c.


As for the code… I was immediately greeted by the screaming-uppercase
typedef crap jungle that is so redundant[1] yet typical in many
commercial products. One may hope that the evolution of the posted
hyper-v code brings a coding strategy breeze into the house of
Microsoft.

[1] DWORD they could have replaced by uint32_t once it became
available via C99's stdint.h. The LPCSTR crap only makes sense if you
are a lazy typist, but I would not call code doing things like LPCSTR
clean. At least it's one thing - consistent. Consistently hard to
read, though.