netdev - Re: [PATCH net-next] net/core: Replace driver version to be kernel version

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Date:   Mon, 27 Jan 2020 07:08:35 +0100
From:   Michal Kubecek <mkubecek@...e.cz>
To:     netdev@...r.kernel.org
Cc:     Shannon Nelson <snelson@...sando.io>,
        Leon Romanovsky <leon@...nel.org>,
        Jakub Kicinski <kuba@...nel.org>,
        "David S . Miller" <davem@...emloft.net>,
        Michal Kalderon <michal.kalderon@...vell.com>,
        RDMA mailing list <linux-rdma@...r.kernel.org>
Subject: Re: [PATCH net-next] net/core: Replace driver version to be kernel
 version

On Sun, Jan 26, 2020 at 02:57:21PM -0800, Shannon Nelson wrote:
> On 1/26/20 2:22 PM, Michal Kubecek wrote:
> > On Sun, Jan 26, 2020 at 02:12:38PM -0800, Shannon Nelson wrote:
> > > Part of the pain of supporting our users is getting them to give us useful
> > > information about their problem.  The more commands I need them to run to
> > > get information about the environment, the less likely I will get anything
> > > useful.  We've been training our users over the years to use "ethtool -i" to
> > > get a good chunk of that info, with the knowledge that the driver version is
> > > only a hint, based upon the distro involved.  I don't want to lose that
> > > hint.  If anything, I'd prefer that we added a field for UTS_RELEASE in the
> > > ethtool output, but I know that's too much to ask.
> > 
> > At the same time, I've been trying to explain both our L1/L2 support
> > guys and our customers that "driver version" information reported by
> > "ethtool -i" is almost useless and that if they really want to identify
> > driver version, they should rather use srcversion as reported by modinfo
> > or sysfs.
> 
> So as I suggested elsewhere, can we compromise by not bashing the driver
> string in the caller stack, but require the in-kernel drivers to use a
> particular macro that will put the kernel/git version into the string?  This
> allows out-of-tree drivers the option of overriding the version with some
> other string that can be meaningful in any other given old or new distro
> kernel.  This should be easy to enforce mechanically with checkpatch, and
> easy enough to do a sweeping coccinelle change on the existing drivers.

Personally, I rather liked what Jakub suggested earlier: set
ethtool_drvinfo::version to kernel version before ops->get_drvinfo() is called
in ethtool_get_drvinfo() (and its netlink counterpart once we get some
consensus about what information should be in the message), clean up in-tree
drivers so that they don't touch it and add a coccinelle check so that we keep
in-tree drivers compliant; this would allow out-of-tree drivers to overwrite
ethtool_drvinfo::version with whatever they want.

Michal