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Date:   Mon, 4 Dec 2023 18:52:10 -0800
From:   Jakub Kicinski <kuba@kernel.org>
To:     Aron Silverton <aron.silverton@oracle.com>
Cc:     Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>,
        Saeed Mahameed <saeed@kernel.org>,
        Jason Gunthorpe <jgg@nvidia.com>,
        David Ahern <dsahern@kernel.org>,
        Arnd Bergmann <arnd@arndb.de>,
        Leon Romanovsky <leonro@nvidia.com>,
        Jiri Pirko <jiri@nvidia.com>, Leonid Bloch <lbloch@nvidia.com>,
        Itay Avraham <itayavr@nvidia.com>,
        linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, Saeed Mahameed <saeedm@nvidia.com>
Subject: Re: [PATCH V3 2/5] misc: mlx5ctl: Add mlx5ctl misc driver
Message-ID: <20231204185210.030a72ca@kernel.org>
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On Mon, 4 Dec 2023 15:37:56 -0600 Aron Silverton wrote:
> > To Jakub's point, no, we don't care about enterprise distros, they are a
> > consumer of our releases and while some of them pay the salaries of our
> > developers, they really don't have much influence over our development
> > rules as they are just so far behind in releases that their releases
> > look nothing like what we do in places (i.e. Linux "like" just like many
> > Android systems.)
> > 
> > If the enterprise distros pop in here and give us their opinions of the
> > patchset, I would GREATLY appreciate it, as having more people review
> > code at this point in time would be most helpful instead of having to
> > hear about how the interfaces are broken 2 years from now.  
> 
> We will be happy to test and review v4 of this series.
> 
> Fully interactive debugging has become essential to getting to the root
> cause of complex issues that arise between the types of devices being
> discussed and their interactions with various software layers. Turning
> knobs and dumping registers just isn't sufficient, and I wish we'd had
> this capability long ago.

Could you shed some light on what issues you were debugging, broadly?

> Our customers have already benefited from the interactive debugging
> capability that these patches provide, but the full potential won't be
> realized until this is upstream.

Can you elaborate on why "full potential won't be realized until this
is upstream"? The driver looks very easy to ship as a standalone module.