Re: [PATCH] remove the raw driver

On Mon, May 31, 2021 at 10:24:33AM +0200, Hannes Reinecke wrote:

On 5/31/21 10:21 AM, Arnd Bergmann wrote:

quoted

On Mon, May 31, 2021 at 9:38 AM Greg KH [off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

On Mon, May 31, 2021 at 10:25:26AM +0300, Christoph Hellwig wrote:

quoted

The raw driver used to provide direct unbuffered access to block devices
before O_DIRECT was invented.  It has been obsolete for more than a
decade.

What?  Really?  We can finally do this?  Yes!

For some reason, I thought there was some IBM userspace tools that
relied on this device, if not, then great!

quoted

Signed-off-by: Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de>

Acked-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>

Acked-by: Arnd Bergmann <arnd@arndb.de>
Link: https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/Pine.LNX.4.64.0703180754060.6605@CPE00045a9c397f-CM001225dbafb6/ (local)

The discussion from 2007 is the last one I could find on lore that has
useful information on when and why this was not removed in the past.
The driver was scheduled from a 2005 removal in 2004, but not removed
because both Red Hat and SuSE relied on the feature in their distros.

 From what I could find out, this continued to be the case in Red Hat
Enterprise Linux 6 and SUSE Linux Enterprise server 11 that were
supported between 2009 and 2020, but the following versions dropped
the support.

Which I can confirm for SUSE.

Thanks, I've queued this up now.

greg k-h