netdev - Re: [PATCH net-next 0/7] Remove three Sun net drivers

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Date:   Fri, 6 Jan 2023 18:04:54 -0800
From:   Anirudh Venkataramanan <anirudh.venkataramanan@...el.com>
To:     John Paul Adrian Glaubitz <glaubitz@...sik.fu-berlin.de>,
        <netdev@...r.kernel.org>
CC:     <linux-pci@...r.kernel.org>, <linuxppc-dev@...ts.ozlabs.org>,
        <linux-mips@...r.kernel.org>, <linux-trace-kernel@...r.kernel.org>,
        <sparclinux@...r.kernel.org>, Leon Romanovsky <leon@...nel.org>
Subject: Re: [PATCH net-next 0/7] Remove three Sun net drivers

On 1/6/2023 5:36 PM, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:
> Hello!
> 
> On 1/6/23 23:00, Anirudh Venkataramanan wrote:
>> This series removes the Sun Cassini, LDOM vswitch and sunvnet drivers.
> 
> This would affect a large number of Linux on SPARC users. Please don't!

Thanks for chiming in. Does your statement above apply to all 3 drivers?

> 
> We're still maintaining an active sparc64 port for Debian, see [1]. So
> does Gentoo [2].
> 
>> In a recent patch series that touched these drivers [1], it was suggested
>> that these drivers should be removed completely. git logs suggest that
>> there hasn't been any significant feature addition, improvement or fixes
>> to user-visible bugs in a while. A web search didn't indicate any recent
>> discussions or any evidence that there are users out there who care about
>> these drivers.
> 
> Well, these drivers just work and I don't see why there should be regular
> discussions about them or changes.

That's fair, but lack of discussion can also be signs of disuse, and 
that's really the hunch I was following up on. Given what you and Karl 
have said, I agree that we shouldn't remove these drivers. I'll stop 
pursuing this unless there are new arguments to the contrary.

Ani