[ovs-dev] Question about supporting the OVS out-of-tree kernel drivers

Mark Gray mark.d.gray at redhat.com
Thu Nov 12 13:10:00 UTC 2020


On 30/10/2020 18:32, Gregory Rose wrote:
> 
> The question is whether there is any interest in continuing to support
> the OVS out-of-tree (OOT) kernel driver or should we deprecate it?  The
> latest kernel support for the OOT driver is up to 5.8.x  There seems to 
> be little interest that I can tell in using the OOT driver.  The main 
> distros all include the kernel built-in OVS driver and those drivers 
> generally seem to support all the primary features required by user space.
> 
> Most of the energy on this list seems to be directed toward DPDK and OVN
> and it doesn't seem to me that either of those require the OOT driver.
> If there's no one actually using the OOT driver I suggest we deprecate
> it and save time and energy on keeping it up to date.
> 
> Opinions, thoughts, comments?
> 

I think it is good to raise this question. Thanks.

It would certainly simplify development of kernel features and avoid the
type of issue that I had recently with a patch in the OOT tree but not
upstream. As I don't know who uses OOT, I can't comment beyond that.

> Thanks,
> 
> - Greg
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