Hi Thomas,
Is deprecating the driver a mandatory step?
I'm not aware of a mandatory requirement, at least not in the sense
of it being documented in Documentation/process like other aspects
of the Linux kernel development process. So I would say it's up to
the Maintainers for Hyper-V and FBDEV as to whether the Hyper-V
FB driver should go through a deprecation phase before being
removed.
Of course, the purpose of the deprecation phase is to be "nice"
to users of the driver by giving them some warning that it is going
away. That gives them an opportunity to raise objections, and/or
to do any necessary migration to the replacement driver. I suspect
there aren't many (or any?) users of Hyper-V FB that can't just move
to the Hyper-V DRM driver, but who knows. We might be surprised.
Let's mark the driver as unmaintained now. There should be a kernel LTS
release around December [1], after which hyperv-fb could be removed.
Anyone with hard dependencies on hyperv-fb can remain in the LTS for a
few more years.
Sure, I will send patch deprecating hyperv_fb driver.
Thanks,
Prasanna
