Subject: Re: [PATCH v4 01/23] iidc: Introduce iidc.h

From: Jason Gunthorpe <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 12 Apr 2021 13:12:14 -0300

On Mon, Apr 12, 2021 at 02:50:43PM +0000, Saleem, Shiraz wrote:

> Because it is an unnecessary thing to force a user to build/load drivers for
> which they don't have the HW for? 

Happens automatically in all distros, so I don't agree with this.

> The problem gets compounded if we have to do it for all future HW
> Intel PCI drivers, i.e. depends on ICE && ....

Then someday build a proper pluggable abstraction and put all your
ethernet drivers under it. 

Today you haven't done that and all we have a set of ops that only
work with one eth driver and a totally different set of functions that
only work with a different driver.

It is all just dead code until it gets finished and process is to not
merge dead code.

> There is a near-term Intel ethernet VF driver which will use IIDC to
> provide RDMA in the VF, and implement some of these .ops
> callbacks. There is also intent to move i40e to IIDC.

"near-term" We are now on year three of Intel talking about this
driver!

Get the bulk of the thing merged and deal with the rest in followup
patches.

> But in a unified irdma driver model connecting to multiple PCI gen
> drivers, I do think it serves a reason.

It is fine as a high level idea, but the implementation has to meet
kernel standards.

Jason