Mailinglist Archive: opensuse-kernel (32 mails)

[Greg KH <gregkh@xxxxxxx>]

On Wed, Feb 09, 2011 at 10:36:38AM -0500, Jeff Mahoney wrote:
> Hi all -
>
> One of the things I've seen cropping up lately is the number of bug
> reports that involve staging drivers. For the uninitiated, staging
> drivers are drivers that have been included in the kernel but are known
> to be of insufficient quality to be considered for "true" inclusion.
> Sometimes drivers in staging are improved and "promoted" to full
> inclusion and other times they are considered abandoned and are dropped
> entirely.
>
> One common example is the rt2860 driver. When I find the time, which is
> becoming rarer these days, I try to backport fixes to this driver to the
> 11.3 kernel since the hardware seems common enough.
>
> The issue as I see it is that we have no way to communicate to the user
> that the driver they're using is of dubious quality. In an ideal world,
> we could take the bug reports and fix the upstream driver. In reality,
> most of us don't have the time to tackle improving a driver for hardware
> we don't have.
>
> So, what's the best way to communicate this to the user? Here's my list
> but I'm open to suggestions:
>
> 1) Move staging drivers to a separate package that isn't installed by
> default

I wouldn't object to this, but it seems a bit harsh as for some systems,
we even support staging drivers to some customers (yeah, I know this
doesn't matter to openSUSE, but not all staging drivers are "bad", some
are there for a variety of reasons, not the least being I forgot to move
them to the "main" portion of the kernel tree...)

> 2) Issue a warning during install or first driver load that the driver
> is of dubious quality

That happens already, so you don't have to do anything new here :)

> 3) Use something like the flags we use in the SLE kernels to document a
> driver as supported or not to prevent the driver from being loaded
> without explicitly enabling it (preferably combined with #2)
> 4) Add a release note documenting which drivers are staging and hope
> that users actually read it (unlikely)
> 5) Don't change anything

6) Assign all staging driver bugs to me?


thanks,

greg k-h
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