svn commit: r330451 - in stable/11/sys: dev/iwm dev/otus dev/usb/wlan net80211

[Warner Losh]

On Fri, Mar 9, 2018 at 8:44 AM, Kyle Evans <kevans at freebsd.org> wrote:

> On Fri, Mar 9, 2018 at 9:28 AM, Rodney W. Grimes
> <freebsd at pdx.rh.cn85.dnsmgr.net> wrote:
> >> On Wed, Mar 07, 2018 at 02:53:49PM -0800, Eitan Adler wrote:
> >> > On 7 March 2018 at 09:37, John Baldwin <jhb at freebsd.org> wrote:
> >> > > ...
> >> > > I suspect many of these changes for iwm, etc. are all intertwined
> >> > > so I'm not sure if you can leave out individual ones.
> >> >
> >> > Possibly. I do have iwm working on my laptop though. I also know of
> >> > one open PR assigned to me w.r.t. a model I don't own. I'll be
> >> > addressing it some time this week.
> >>
> >> I often have mixed feelings when I see lots of similar changes (i.e.
> >> that make up for better hardware support, esp. on a laptop) MFCed.
> >> I'd rather see laptop users run -CURRENT and leave -STABLE branches
> >> for very conservative (server?) users who can't/don't want to afford
> >> the risks of running -CURRENT or require ABI stability in a really
> >> long run, rather than binge-merging things. :-)
> >>
> >> By default it should be -CURRENT all over; it's a very good thing
> >> that we as a Project ourselves are doing this as part of our own
> >> dogfood eating strategy.
> >
> > As a data point just last night a person came into #freebsd irc
> > channel with a none working wireless nic on a desktop, he was
> > attemtping to use a Realteak RTL8192EU on 11.1-RELEASE.
> >
> > Someone had already told him to try urtwn driver, which in
> > -current is the right driver and supports this device.
> >
> > It did not work for him.  This is about when I came in to the
> > discussion, and helped to confirm that -current did infact
> > have support for this device, and that this supported had
> > existed in -current for 16 months, and that this support
> > would not be a simple grab a couple driver files and build
> > it on 11.1.
> >
> > The commit to add this support involves 46 files, which 18
> > of are new files.
> >
> > My feelings are if this driver has been in -current for
> > 16 months why is it NOT in -stable yet?  I know part of
> > the answer "its not a simple merge".  But as a project
> > this is egg on our face.  We can merge a new very complicated
> > change to a our boot code, within a few months (thank you
> > kevans for that work), but we can not merge back a
> > device driver in 16?
> >
>
> I had the same questions- this exact same person had hopped over to
> #freebsd-wifi and I had walked through this same process, identifying
> it as "not MFC-able" at this point because so many commits having been
> left un-merged prior to it. I've already recently gone through the fun
> of catching up on one and a half years worth of unmerged work in
> stand, I'm not really prepared to do it again quite yet.
>
> It felt pretty bad having to tell him that his only option here was to
> either hop on -CURRENT + rtwn(4) or grab a stable/11 supported NIC-
> especially since stable/11 is still supposed to be supported for
> another three (3!) years, and I had to leave before I could help him
> walk through getting it setup on -CURRENT properly
>

one has to wonder why 12.0 is so far in the future....

Warner