On Sun, Nov 29, 2020 at 02:30:29AM +0100, Ilya Maximets wrote: > On 11/12/20 6:04 PM, Gregory Rose wrote: > > > > > > On 11/12/2020 5:10 AM, Mark Gray wrote: > >> On 30/10/2020 18:32, Gregory Rose wrote: > >>> > >>> The question is whether there is any interest in continuing to support > >>> the OVS out-of-tree (OOT) kernel driver or should we deprecate it? The > >>> latest kernel support for the OOT driver is up to 5.8.x There seems to > >>> be little interest that I can tell in using the OOT driver. The main > >>> distros all include the kernel built-in OVS driver and those drivers > >>> generally seem to support all the primary features required by user space. > >>> > >>> Most of the energy on this list seems to be directed toward DPDK and OVN > >>> and it doesn't seem to me that either of those require the OOT driver. > >>> If there's no one actually using the OOT driver I suggest we deprecate > >>> it and save time and energy on keeping it up to date. > >>> > >>> Opinions, thoughts, comments? > >>> > >> > >> I think it is good to raise this question. Thanks. > >> > >> It would certainly simplify development of kernel features and avoid the > >> type of issue that I had recently with a patch in the OOT tree but not > >> upstream. As I don't know who uses OOT, I can't comment beyond that. > > > > I'm knee deep in some work at my day job but when I get a > > chance I'm going to send a patch for the faq, NEWS, etc. and request > > that we deprecate the OOT driver and end support for newer kernels > > at the current 5.8. After that we'll only take bug fixes. > > > > I don't really believe there are any consumers for the OOT driver > > on this list anymore. Certainly the lack of response to this > > question indicates that. > > CC: ovs-discuss > > Thanks for raising this question. > > As far as the topic goes, the only thing that might get people to use > the OOT module with kernels higher than 5.8 is SST or LISP support. > On the other hand, there were reasons to reject patches to support these > protocols in the mainline kernel. And I have no idea if anyone is actually > using them. I never used them and I'm not even sure if they actually work > taking into account that we have only 2 system tests for them that doesn't > really check much. > > Maybe we could also raise the question during the conference to get more > attention. I'd like to add a reference into my "community updates" > presentation. > > I know that it takes a lot of time to support OOT kernel module and it > doesn't seem worth the effort. I'd vote for deprecation and eventual > removal. Sending patches is a good idea, with them we could move forward > if no strong objections will appear. And thanks for all the work you did > supporting kernel module all that time!
Since the conference already happened, have you decided something? I suggest to follow "Feature Deprecation Guidelines" section in Documentation/internals/contributing/submitting-patches.rst with the addition of warning when building that code for extra visibility. Thanks, -- fbl _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list disc...@openvswitch.org https://mail.openvswitch.org/mailman/listinfo/ovs-discuss
