staging drivers

Marciniszyn, Mike mike.marciniszyn at intel.com
Thu Jul 16 19:18:46 UTC 2015


Greg,

We are in the process of submitting an RDMA driver for the Intel OPA architecture.

The current massive patch set is submitted to add the driver to the infiniband tree. 

I'm wondering if the staging area is a better spot to land the driver at first? That way everyone can see it being reworked and participate in that process.

Some considerations:
- There are today significant comments
  o Use of write instead of some other control.
     (See qib commit 4961772560d2, http://marc.info/?l=linux-rdma&m=143455871310614&w=2 )
  o Use of sysfs as qib does
  o Duplication of code (ipath, qib, hfi1) (we are removing ipath to eventually help in that respect)
- Driver is still being developed
  o If we put the driver into staging there will be a lot of patches from the above rework as well as internal development
 
Given these points (existing flaws, development dynamics), is staging suitable?

Is there a better way to get the initial driver into staging (vs. a massive patch set)?

I'm also interested in any comments you might have on Al's commit message and alternatives (write, ioctl, generic netlink).

Mike




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