Messages in this thread | | | Date | Tue, 24 Feb 2004 14:33:58 -0600 | From | Matt Domsch <> | Subject | Re: [PATCH][BUGFIX] : megaraid patch for 2.10.1 (irq disable bug fix) |
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On Tue, Feb 24, 2004 at 09:06:43AM -0600, James Bottomley wrote: > On Tue, 2004-02-24 at 08:47, Mukker, Atul wrote: > > We are in process of releasing a unified driver, which will natively support > > the 2.4.x and 2.6.x kernels. > > I really don't think this will be such a good idea since you don't > currently have a unified driver. 2.4 is approaching end of life as far > as major driver updates go and the 2.6 APIs are quite a bit different. > You'll find it's a lot of work for a driver that will carry you at most > six months before the distributions all switch to 2.6 and you find the > 2.4 compatibility layer to be more of a hindrance than a help.
Distributions with 2.4 kernels will continue to live on for quite a while. Red Hat Enterprise Linux has a 5-year support life, during which we would expect LSI to release new hardware, and we would want to be able to have that hardware work on that OS somehow. The driver source for 2.4 and 2.6 need not be identical, but there *will* be ongoing maintenance for drivers on 2.4 kernels for the next several years. We're <6 months into the RHEL3 supported lifetime.
While I understand the concerns with keeping 2.4 and 2.6 drivers separate, we can't ignore the maintenance for 2.4 drivers. If that's done on a 2.4-only stream, or cleanly with a joint 2.4/2.6 driver, I don't care, but agree it's difficult to do a clean joint driver, especially with all the SCSI subsystem changes.
Thanks, Matt
-- Matt Domsch Sr. Software Engineer, Lead Engineer Dell Linux Solutions linux.dell.com & www.dell.com/linux Linux on Dell mailing lists @ http://lists.us.dell.com - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
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