On Thu, Jun 05, 2025 at 09:40:27AM -0700, Warner Losh wrote: > Bringing it back to wifi: we're so far behind the curve on WiFi today > that we shouldn't saddle it with stability prematurely. We should do > things like kv pairs to make it better. We should try not to shoot > ourselves in the foot. But mistakes will be made almost certainly > despite due care, and I'd rather give the wifi folks a > get-out-jail-free card on a temporary basis to allow them to catch up > because doing backwards compat stuff isn't super hard, but can be > super time-consuming especially when there's no tests to assure > accidents don't happen and tracking down why something crashed for > binary compat reasons can take a huge amount of time. At least when I > did this stuff for a release or two for drm-kmod when we did try hard > to stay compatible for several minor releases. It was a ton of work. I > don't think we currently have the resources to commit to that work > because it will come at the expense of new features.
I think this is the best compromise. I do think we might want to consider batching of wifi MFCs so most breaks occur infrequently (perhaps around release time) rather than scattered through out the inter-release period. My thinking here is that we shouldn't be breaking things for stable users more often than necessarily and for the brave it wouldn't be that big a deal to pull from a rebased MFC candidate branch. This wouldn't be free, but maybe it's got a reasonable cost/benefit ratio. -- Brooks
