Messages in this thread | | | Date | Wed, 16 Mar 2016 09:36:46 -0700 | Subject | Re: [WTF] utterly tasteless ABI in hfi1 (around ->write()/->write_iter()) | From | Linus Torvalds <> |
| |
On Wed, Mar 16, 2016 at 8:46 AM, Doug Ledford <dledford@redhat.com> wrote: > > If we want to maintain back compatibility, then the qib driver has to > maintain this interface. We could possibly do a new one as well, but we > can't remove this one.
We've broken more important driver ABI's before - all the nasty X stuff.
Now, the X people did learn their lesson, and it hasn't happened lately (thank Gods!), but quite frankly, some shit-for-brains hardware-specific config interface for a rdma device that basically nobody uses is a _lot_ less important than X ever was.
So I don't care one whit if we break it, and it's not the kind of backwards compatibility the kernel should worry about. There are exactly zero regular users of this interface. I assume that people who use this thing are *so* deeply technical that they can take care of themselves. And it really is a completely broken interface.
I might be proven wrong, and somebody's dear old grandma ends up complaining about a new kernel breaking her configuration, and in that case we'd have to revert anything that causes that breakage. But I suspect I'm not wrong.
Linus
| |