Date: Thu, 4 Oct 2018 07:07:43 -0600 From: Warner Losh <imp@bsdimp.com> To: Alexey Dokuchaev <danfe@freebsd.org> Cc: Brooks Davis <brooks@freebsd.org>, FreeBSD Net <freebsd-net@freebsd.org>, freebsd-fcp@freebsd.org, FreeBSD-STABLE Mailing List <freebsd-stable@freebsd.org>, "freebsd-arch@freebsd.org" <freebsd-arch@freebsd.org> Subject: Re: FCP-0101: Deprecating most 10/100 Ethernet drivers Message-ID: <CANCZdfpFXs_Ed-gMZnnSs2eAxYh8hdwr-6dh9rpUUPbZXO0hWA@mail.gmail.com> In-Reply-To: <20181004084411.GA50348@FreeBSD.org> References: <20181003210516.GA71565@spindle.one-eyed-alien.net> <20181004084411.GA50348@FreeBSD.org>
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On Thu, Oct 4, 2018 at 2:45 AM Alexey Dokuchaev <danfe@freebsd.org> wrote: > Looking at the commits they require near zero maintenance. What exactly > is the burden here? > I believe that characterization is incorrect. There's a burden. And it's death of a thousand cuts. And many of those cuts have been inflicted on brooks@. Most of these drivers have had dozens or hundreds of commits each over the years to keep up with the API changes. This acts as a tax on innovation because it's such a pain in the back side to change all the drivers in the tree. I did a back of the envelope computation that this is on the order of hundreds of hours of time, spread across all the drivers over all the years we've supported them. Some of these drivers are clearly unused, and so that's 100% wasted effort. Most of these drivers are on machines that most likely won't be able to run 13.0 well when it comes out in 2 years due to increased memory demands that it will almost certainly have. The declining use means we anticipate that if we were to maintain them until 13, it would be wasted effort for at least some on the list. That's why that one way to get the driver off the list is to convert to iflib. That greatly reduces the burden by centralizing all the stupid, common things of a driver so that we only have to change one place, not dozens. At the root of this problem is the community's long resistance to having data reported back to the project data about the machines running FreeBSD. Absent any real and significant data, the only way to know if things are unused is to ask. We cannot have the act of merely asking cause people to freak out and hurl expletives all over the place. That's significantly not cool. Warner
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