Messages in this thread | | | Date | Thu, 21 Feb 2008 17:33:10 -0500 | From | Jeff Garzik <> | Subject | Re: Merging of completely unreviewed drivers |
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Arjan van de Ven wrote: > On Thu, 21 Feb 2008 23:01:24 +0200 > Adrian Bunk <bunk@kernel.org> wrote: > >> [ Linus Added to the To: since I want to hear his opinion on this >> issue. ] >> >> On Thu, Feb 21, 2008 at 12:28:55PM -0800, Roland Dreier wrote: >>> > This driver should really have gotten some review before being >>> > included in the kernel. >>> >>> > Even a simple checkpatch run finds more than > 250 stylistic >>> > errors (not code bugs but cases where the driver violates the >>> > standard code formatting rules of kernel code). >>> >>> Linus has strongly stated that we should merge hardware drivers >>> early, and I agree: although the nes driver clearly needs more >>> work, there's no advantage to users with the hardware in forcing >>> them to wait for 2.6.26 to merge the driver, since they'll just >>> have to patch the grungy code in themselves anyway. And by merging >>> the driver early, we get fixed up for any tree-wide changes and >>> allow janitors to help with the cleanup. >> Is it really intended to merge drivers without _any_ kind of review? > > No of course not. > > I totally agree we should be more agressive in merging drivers earlier. > A minimal review needs to happen so for a few things imo > 1) That the driver doesn't break the build > 2) That the driver has no obvious huge security holes > (this is a big deal for unsuspecting users) > 3) that there's not an obscene amount of "uses deprecated api" compiler warnings > (since those are annoying for everyone else) > 4) that people who don't have the hardware are not negatively affected > (say crashes without the hw or so)
FWIW, my general guidelines for merging drivers in my areas are:
1) it's not fugly
2) it has an active maintainer who responds to feedback
I tend to think it is NOT in the best interests of Linux users, for us to merge vendor-fugly drivers with many layers of OS wrappers and similar obfuscation.
But similarly... I merge drivers long before our SCSI maintainer will, and I value "it works" above stupid checkpatch warnings.
Jeff
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