Re: [for-next 5/6] net/mlx5: Bump driver version

On Fri, May 26, 2017 at 02:53:18PM -0700, Jakub Kicinski wrote:

On Fri, 26 May 2017 12:55:22 -0400, Dennis Dalessandro wrote:

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I realize Dave has already pulled this and I'm not asking for it to be
reverted but maybe some discussion will help guide future patch submissions
which do this stuff.

Sure, although i don't think we are going to use those version fields
in the future,
please allow me to ask, how do you do your driver versioning ? how do
you track things ?
and what is your future vision regarding ethool->drv_version ?

That's just the thing, we don't do anything with it either really. I'm
trying to justify its existence to myself and if you folks had some whiz
bang idea for a driver version I was interested in hearing what it was.

FWIW I put VERMAGIC_STRING in drv_version:

# ethtool -i p4p1
driver: nfp
version: 4.12.0-rc2-perf-00282-gc42dfc79
...

I think I got that idea from Felix Fietkau.  The backport-ified version
of the driver [1] uses git hash and "o-o-t" sting:

# ethtool -i p4p1
driver: nfp
version: 49e5c6abf5b2 (o-o-t)
...

So it's pretty easy to tell which driver the customer is using.  I
could probably throw in the output of $(git rev-list --count HEAD) to
have an automatic monotonically increasing "version" when built
out-of-tree, hm...

Thanks for the pointer. I'll try to evaluate it.

[1] https://github.com/Netronome/nfp-drv-kmods