Re: [PATCH net-next V3] net: ena: Add a driver for Amazon Elastic Network Adapters (ENA)

On Fri, Jul 15, 2016 at 08:17:59AM -0700, Benjamin Poirier wrote:

On 2016/07/15 08:00, Leon Romanovsky wrote:

quoted

On Thu, Jul 14, 2016 at 09:46:14AM +0300, Netanel Belgazal wrote:

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This is a driver for the ENA family of networking devices.

Signed-off-by: Netanel Belgazal <redacted>
---

Notes:

...

quoted

    - Increase driver version to 1.0.2

...

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+static void ena_get_drvinfo(struct net_device *dev,
+			    struct ethtool_drvinfo *info)
+{
+	struct ena_adapter *adapter = netdev_priv(dev);
+
+	strlcpy(info->driver, DRV_MODULE_NAME, sizeof(info->driver));
+	strlcpy(info->version, DRV_MODULE_VERSION, sizeof(info->version));

Does module version give anything valuable in real life usage?
Do you plan to bump version after every patch?

Hint, NO.

[...]

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+
+#define DRV_MODULE_VER_MAJOR	1
+#define DRV_MODULE_VER_MINOR	0
+#define DRV_MODULE_VER_SUBMINOR 1
+
+#define DRV_MODULE_NAME		"ena"
+#ifndef DRV_MODULE_VERSION
+#define DRV_MODULE_VERSION \
+	__stringify(DRV_MODULE_VER_MAJOR) "."	\
+	__stringify(DRV_MODULE_VER_MINOR) "."	\
+	__stringify(DRV_MODULE_VER_SUBMINOR)
+#endif
+#define DRV_MODULE_RELDATE      "22-JUNE-2016"

Please remove it, driver version is useless in real life kernel usage.

The release date might be a bit overkill but the driver version is
useful in the context of distribution kernels where users sometimes mix
and match newer drivers (ex: the intel sf.net drivers) with older
kernels. When a bug is reported, a quick look at the module version can
help indicate the provenance of the driver.

We already discussed it in a number of occasions, for example this is
response of Greg Kroah-Hartman to similar attempt to bump driver version
[1].

And as I said before, mostly this driver will change without any
reflection in driver version.

[1] http://www.spinics.net/lists/linux-rdma/msg29855.html