Subject: Re: [PATCH net-next v2] net: move decnet to staging

From: Joe Perches <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 14 Nov 2017 07:07:13 -0800

On Mon, 2017-11-13 at 12:25 -0800, Eric Dumazet wrote:
> On Mon, 2017-11-13 at 11:32 -0800, Joe Perches wrote:
> > On Mon, 2017-11-13 at 09:11 -0800, Stephen Hemminger wrote:
> > > Support for Decnet has been orphaned for some time.
> > > In the interest of reducing the potential bug surface and pre-holiday
> > > cleaning, move the decnet protocol into staging for eventual removal.
> > 
> > []
> > > diff --git a/drivers/staging/decnet/TODO b/drivers/staging/decnet/TODO
> > 
> > []
> > > @@ -0,0 +1,4 @@
> > > +The DecNet code will be removed soon from the kernel tree as it is old,
> > > +obsolete, and buggy.
> > 
> > Old and obsolete, well OK, but
> > what's buggy about decnet?
> > 
> > https://bugzilla.kernel.org/buglist.cgi?quicksearch=decnet
> > 
> > Zarro Boogs found.
> > 
> 
> Then that means nobody uses it.

No, it doesn't mean that.

> And that syzkaller guys never bothered to add code to actually trigger
> the bugs that are probably there. Probably they have bigger fishes to
> fry at this moment.

It may mean that.

> If we leave the code there, chances are high that some hacker is
> interested into exploiting the bugs.

linux isn't bsd.
The code is there already.