Re: [Bonding-announce] [PATCH SET][bonding] cleanup

From: Chad N. Tindel
Date: Thu Sep 25 2003 - 16:13:13 EST


> >> I was going to add it on to the end of the clean up set, but
> >> if you want to do it, go ahead. Nobody seems to have objected to
> >> removing the _OLD stuff, which I view as a good thing.
>
> My thinking here is that any ifenslave old enough (two years
> or more) to still be using the OLD ioctl values is unlikely to work
> with the current kernel driver, and if somebody did try it, it's
> better to have the call fail outright than perform weird and
> mysterious rituals in kernel memory. I have trouble envisioning an
> scenario where a user would be using the latest 2.4.23 kernel, but an
> ifenslave from, what, 2.2.15? 2.4.5? or so.

I was specifically told by David Miller that we are not to break binary
compatibility within a 2.4 release. Such things had to wait until 2.5
or later. We can not require a user to upgrade their ifenslave within a 2.4
series kernel just to keep using the same functionality they were using in
2.4.1. Obviously we can require them to upgrade in order to keep using
new functionality. So the _OLD stuff needs to stay in the 2.4 kernel. If
this was brought up in an earlier thread, then I just missed it.

Chad
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