On 31 Jan 19:30, Geert Uytterhoeven wrote:

On Mon, Jan 31, 2022 at 6:59 PM Stephen Hemminger
[off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

On Mon, 31 Jan 2022 09:24:50 -0800
Saeed Mahameed [off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

From: Saeed Mahameed <saeedm@nvidia.com>

NET_VENDOR_XYZ were defaulted to 'y' for no technical reason.

Since all drivers belonging to a vendor are supposed to default to 'n',
defaulting all vendors to 'n' shouldn't be an issue, and aligns well
with the 'no new drivers' by default mentality.

Signed-off-by: Saeed Mahameed <saeedm@nvidia.com>

This was done back when vendors were introduced in the network drivers tree.
The default of Y allowed older configurations to just work.

And changing the defaults means all defconfigs must be updated first,
else the user's configs will end up without drivers needed.

As I understand correctly, at least for most common net drivers, 
having NET_VENDOR_XYZ=y doesn't actually build anything, we have flags per
module for each vendor and those are defaulted to N.

quoted

So there was a reason, not sure if it matters anymore.
But it seems like useless repainting to change it now.

It might make sense to tune some of the defaults (i.e. change to
"default y if ARCH_*") for drivers with clear platform dependencies.

either set hard default to 'n' or just keep it as is, anything else is just
more confusion.

Gr{oetje,eeting}s,

                       Geert

--
Geert Uytterhoeven -- There's lots of Linux beyond ia32 -- geert@linux-m68k.org

In personal conversations with technical people, I call myself a hacker. But
when I'm talking to journalists I just say "programmer" or something like that.
                               -- Linus Torvalds