Re: [Pv-drivers] [PATCH 12/12] VMCI: Some header and config files.

On Friday, November 30, 2012 10:39:18 AM Greg KH wrote:

On Fri, Nov 30, 2012 at 09:20:41AM -0800, Dmitry Torokhov wrote:

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On Friday, November 30, 2012 09:09:21 AM Greg KH wrote:

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On Fri, Nov 30, 2012 at 08:47:46AM -0800, Andy King wrote:

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I didn't get the resend either, so it seems our corporate mail really
is
eating messages.  Lovely.

quoted

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+#define IOCTLCMD(_cmd) IOCTL_VMCI_ ## _cmd

I don't recall ever getting a valid answer for this (if you did,
my
appologies, can you repeat it).  What in the world are you talking
about here?  Why is your driver somehow special from the thousands
of other ones that use the in-kernel IO macros properly for an
ioctl?

Because we're morons.  And unfortunately, we've shipped our product
using those broken definitions: our VMX uses them to talk to the
driver.
So here's what we'd like to do.  We will send out a patch soon that
fixes the other issues you mention and also adds IOCTL definitions the
proper way using _IOBLAH().  But we'd also like to retain these broken
definitions for a short period, commented as such, at least until we
can get out a patch release to Workstation 9, at which point we can
remove them.  Does that sound reasonable?

It has been my experience, that when people say "We will remove that api
sometime in the future", it never happens.  So why not just do it now?

Especially given that this code will be coming out in 3.9 at the
earliest, and that is 6 months away, so that should be plenty of time to
get this fixed up.

Our schedule for releasing hosted products is not necessarily aligned
with mainline kernel releases.

And kernel developers don't really care about company schedules, nor
should they, you know this :)

That is why we are offering a compromise so that older installations
have a chance to work and nobody has to care about schedules too much.

However you snipped the rest of my reply: do we really need to renumber 
ioctls? There is no benefit for the driver as its ioctl handler does
not parse the numbers into components.

Thanks,
Dmitry