On Tue, May 24, 2011 at 11:03 PM, Andy Gospodarek [off-list ref] wrote:

On Tue, May 24, 2011 at 10:00:23PM +0800, Américo Wang wrote:

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On Mon, May 23, 2011 at 11:13 PM, Andy Gospodarek [off-list ref] wrote:

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On Mon, May 23, 2011 at 08:45:14PM +0800, Américo Wang wrote:

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Hello, Jay, Andy,

Is there any peculiar reason that bonding code has to stay
in drivers/net/ directory?

Since bonding and bridge are somewhat similar, both of
which are used to "bond" two or more devices into one,
and bridge code is already in net/bridge/, so I think it also
makes sense to move bonding code into net/bonding/ too.

This could also help to grep the source more easily. :)

What do you think about the patch below?
(Note, this patch is against net-next-2.6.)

I would rather keep the code for bonding in drivers/net since it is
really a pure device (though not directly tied to any specific
hardware) rather than a device + forwarding or management code.

Is this a reason strong enough to leave it to drivers/net/ ?
I think it is generic enough to be moved to net/ directory... :-/

I think the distinction is an important one and is one of the main
reasons why I would like to see bonding stay in drivers/net.

Is this a rule that we judge if a piece of code should be in net/
or drivers/net/ ? For me, that big difference between these
two directory is clearly if the code is generic or hardware/platform
independent.

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It has bothered me for a long time that the code just to manage the VLAN
and bridge devices sits outside of drivers/net, but I've never proposed
a patch to move the files as I suspect the maintainers of that code
would like to keep it all together.  Maybe it is time to do that.

You mean move net/8021q/ to drivers/net/8021q/ ?

No.  I'm talking about the parts in the bridging and vlan code that
specifically setup devices, not all of the code.  I would be happier
if code that created objects of type net_device_ops all lived in
drivers/net.  Then all the drivers (real, stacked, or virtual) are in
the same place.

This would make grepping the source code more harder
than it is, at least now we can grepping all bridge source code
in net/bridge/, for example.

Actually the vlan case you mentioned can be another example
to show that to moving bonding code into net/ makes sense.