On 1/31/2022 10:35 AM, Saeed Mahameed wrote:

On 31 Jan 19:30, Geert Uytterhoeven wrote:

quoted

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',

quoted

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.

Right, but once you start hiding NET_VENDOR_DRIVER_XYZ under a 
NET_VENDOR_XYZ Kconfig symbol dependency, if NET_VENDOR_XYZ is not set 
to Y, then you have no way to select NET_VENDOR_DRIVER_XYZ and so your 
old defconfig breaks.

quoted

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.

Maybe the rule should go like this: any new driver vendor defaults to n, 
and existing ones remain set to y, until we deprecate doing that and 
switching them all off to n by 5.18?
-- 
Florian