On Fri, Sep 26, 2014 at 10:08:55AM -0400, Neil Horman wrote: > On Fri, Sep 26, 2014 at 11:28:05AM +0200, Thomas Monjalon wrote: > > 2014-09-16 16:16, Neil Horman: > > > On Fri, Sep 12, 2014 at 02:05:23PM -0400, John W. Linville wrote: > > > > Ping? Are there objections to this patch from mid-July? > > > > > > Thomas, Where are you on this? It seems like if you don't have any > > > objections > > > to this patch, it should go in, in ilght of the lack of further > > > commentary. > > > > 1) It doesn't appear as a top priority. > Thats your responsibility. Patches can't languish and rot on a list forever > just because others aren't willing to test it. If theres further testing that > you feel it needs, ask. But from my read, its been tested for functionality > and > performance (though high performance is never expected from a AF_PACKET PMD). > Given that any one PMD will not affect the performance of another in > isolation, > I'm not sure what more you're waiting for here. > > > 2) It's competing with pcap PMD and bifurcated PMD to come > > (http://dpdk.org/ml/archives/dev/2014-September/005379.html) > Regarding the pcap PMD, so? Its an alternate implementation that provides > different features with different limitations. The fact that they are > simmilar > is irrelevant. If simmilarity was the test, then we wouldn't bother with the > bifurcated driver either, because the pcap pmd already exists. > > Regarding the bifurcated driver, you can't hold existing patches on the > promise > of another pmd thats comming at an indeterminate time in the future. Theres > no > reason not to take this now and deprecate it in the future if there is > sufficient overlap with the bifurcated driver, though to my point above, they > still address different needs with different limitations, so I don't see doing > so as necessecary. > > > 3) There is no test associated with this PMD. > That would have been a great comment to make a few months back, though whats > wrong with testpmd here? That seems to be the same test that every other pmd > uses. What exactly are you looking for? > > > > If one of this item becomes wrong, it should go in. > > > > > Currently, 2 projects are being initiated for validation (dcts) and > > documentation. Keeping new things outside of the DPDK core makes it > > clear that they have not to be supported by dcts and doc yet. > > So, it is better to have an external PMD, like memnic, acting as a > > staging area. > > > So, this brings up an excellent point - Validation and support. Commonly open > source projects don't provide support at the upstream HEAD. Those items are > applied and inforced by distributors. Theres no need to ensure that the > upstream head is always the most performance and stable point of the tree. > Its > that need that keeps the development pace slow, and creates frustrations like > this one, where a patch sits unaddressed for long periods of time. Commonly > the > workflow for most open source projects is for there to be a window of time > where > visual review and basic functional testing are sufficient for acceptance into > the head of the tree. After the development window closes there is a > stabilization period where testing/validation is done to ensure that no > regressions have been encountered, optionally with a -next branch temporarily > being created to accept patches for upcomming future releases. If regressions > are found, its a simple matter in git to bisect back to the offending patch, > allow the contributing developer an opportunity to fix the issue, or to drop > the > patch. Using a workflow like this we can have a reasonable balance of needs > (good patch turn around time, as well as reasonable testing). We've discussed > this when I posted the PMD_REGISTER_DRIVER patch months ago, and I thought you > were going to move in the direction of this workflow. What happened? > > > During this time, keeping this PMD separately will allow you to update it > > with a maintainer account in dpdk.org. I just need your SSH public key. > > > We've discussed this too, keeping PMDs maintained separately is a very bad > idea. > Doing so means developers have to constantly be aware of changes to the core > tree and try to keep up individually. Integrating them all means that API > changes can be easily propogated to all PMD's when needed without making work > for many people. Its exactly the reason we encourage driver writers to open > source drivers in Linux, because not doing so closes developers off from the > free maintenence they get when optimizations are made to API's. And if you > follow the development model above, you don't need to worry about implied > support, as that correctly becomes a distributor issue. > > > Neil
While not wanting to get too involved in the discussion, I'd just like to express my support for getting this new PMD merged in. /Bruce
