RFC: deprecation of nve(4) in 10-STABLE and removal from 11-CURRENT

[Yonghyeon PYUN]

On Mon, Feb 03, 2014 at 02:56:37PM +0100, Christian Brueffer wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> for some time now we have had two drivers for NVIDIA NForce/MCP network
> chips, namely nve(4) and nfe(4).
> 
> The former came first and is based on a binary blob.  The latter was
> later ported from OpenBSD and is blob-free.
> 
> nfe(4) supports all chips nve(4) supports, in addition to all the newer
> hardware.  In essence, nfe(4) has been the de-facto standard driver for
> a long time.  nve(4) has been commented out in GENERIC since 2007.
> 
> For this reason I propose deprecating nve(4) in 10-STABLE and removing
> it from HEAD.
> 
> Does anyone see a reason not to do this?

A couple of users were still using nve(4) in the past. I guess
the issue might be lack of code for waking up MAC/PHY from
powerdown.  nfe(4) already has the needed code and should support
all known NVIDIA ethernet controllers with full offloading support.
So no objection from me.