if_data size issues

[Brooks Davis]

On Thu, Sep 02, 2004 at 02:05:00AM -0600, M. Warner Losh wrote:
> In message: <20040902000637.GA4120 at odin.ac.hmc.edu>
>             Brooks Davis <brooks at one-eyed-alien.net> writes:
> :  - After 5.3 is released, declare that upgrades to 6.0 from releases
> :    other then 4.x (x>=11) and 5.y (y>=3) require special handling and
> :    allow if_data to grow as demand requires.
> 
> There have long been plans to remove support to upgrade to 6.0 from
> 4.x, and I plan on moving forward with those plans after the 5.3
> branch.  There are a large number of hacks in place to allow upgrading
> all the way back to the 4.0 branch point, and these hacks have been
> the source of a lot of frustration and gnashing of teeth over the
> years.  By right of conquest (eg writing the legacy library and
> working with both sides of this issue for litterally years), and by
> general consensus of the folks that do the grunt work to make it
> possible to upgrade, I think that desupporting upgrade to 6.0 from
> anything less than 5.2 (or maybe 5.1 for a time) is a reasonable path
> to follow.  Given that the rest of the build system support for
> upgrades will be limited, I'm not sure the benefit of supporting the
> upgrade from 4.11 to 6.  We never really supported upgrading from
> 3.5.1 to 5.0-Release, for example.

Note that a change of the size of struct if_data doesn't totally break
ugprades from old versions, it just requires a bit of pre-planning if
your upgrade process requires ifconfig or if you need the ability to
roll back.

-- Brooks

-- 
Any statement of the form "X is the one, true Y" is FALSE.
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