Messages in this thread | | | Date | Thu, 19 Jan 2006 17:46:12 -0600 | From | Matt Domsch <> | Subject | Re: 3c59x went nuts between .15-mm3 and .15-mm4 |
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On Thu, Jan 19, 2006 at 03:27:57PM -0800, Andrew Morton wrote: > Steffen Klassert <klassert@mathematik.tu-chemnitz.de> wrote: > > > > The driver version did not increase since more than three years. > > But perhaps it is a good idea to maintain the driver version. > > Just nuke it. Per-driver versioning is pretty meaningless and we should > and do identify driver versions by the version of the top-level kernel > which contains them.
With all due respect, per-driver versioning in mainline may be meaningless (and as you note, modinfo already carries the kernel version in it), but as soon as it hits a vendor kernel, it means very much, and is the primary method of denoting to a larger (and mostly non-driver-developer) audience what hardware is supported, and what critical (to the vendor) bugs have been addressed.
And some tools, such as DKMS, make explicit use of the MODULE_VERSION tag to automate updating individual drivers without necessarily changing out the whole vendor kernel. Once the vendor kernel "catches up" with the equivalent driver, DKMS won't replace it any more. All of the drivers critical to Dell are separately versioned exactly for this reason, and those tags are in the code submitted to mainline. (3c59x isn't in that category I admit).
Thanks, Matt
-- Matt Domsch Software Architect 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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