On Mon, Jan 31, 2022 at 10:55:14AM -0800, Hisashi T Fujinaka wrote:

On Mon, 31 Jan 2022, Florian Fainelli wrote:

quoted

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

quoted

On 31 Jan 19:30, Geert Uytterhoeven wrote:

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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:

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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.

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.

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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?

Forgive my ignorance, but isn't it a regression if things quit working
even if it's just a configuration change?

No, kernel configs never were declared as ABI as "regular" users are not
supposed to touch it. They use something provided by the distro.

From a user perspective I like having everything turned on initially so
it just works. Pruning things down is a lot easier than trying to figure
out what all to turn on. Especially in graphics.

I have completely opposite view here and prefer to have minimal config
for my CI, and for my working machines as well. 

Thanks

-- 
Hisashi T Fujinaka - htodd@twofifty.com