[ofa-general] FW: QLogic vNIC Kernel Submission

[Roland Dreier]

    John> It looks as if my original email was "scrubbed" before it made
    John> the mailing list so I am resending it...  QLogic has been
    John> attempting to submit our virtual NIC (vNIC) driver to the
    John> Linux kernel for several months.  We have made changes to the
    John> code based on the feedback we have received over four rounds
    John> of submissions. Among the feedback we received during this
    John> process was a request to alter our code to use a single value
    John> per file for configuration of our driver through sysfs
    John> interface.  After spending much time and effort to complete
    John> this change to our design we re-submitted the driver only to
    John> receive a response suggesting that we change once again from
    John> this interface to a different API interface called rtnl_link. 
    John> Needless to say I am very frustrated with this process. This
    John> new API interface would require substantial changes to our
    John> code.

    John> QLogic has met the initial request to move to a single valued
    John> sysfs interface and I would hope that this new request will be
    John> waived and will not be a roadblock to inclusion of our driver
    John> to the kernel.

No, we are not going to "waive" this request.  The one thing that we
really really want to get right when merging code is the
userspace-visible interface it presents, because changing it after the
fact is very painful.

I can understand why this might be frustrating for you, but we're simply
not going to do something that is technically wrong just because some
code reviewers were busy when you first posted your code for review.