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

Gregory Rose gvrose8192 at gmail.com
Thu Nov 12 17:04:56 UTC 2020



On 11/12/2020 5:10 AM, Mark Gray wrote:
> 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.

I'm knee deep in some work at my day job but when I get a
chance I'm going to send a patch for the faq, NEWS, etc. and request
that we deprecate the OOT driver and end support for newer kernels
at the current 5.8.  After that we'll only take bug fixes.

I don't really believe there are any consumers for the OOT driver
on this list anymore.  Certainly the lack of response to this
question indicates that.

Thanks,

- Greg



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