Bug#568903: Enable USB/IP staging drivers
Hi Ben,
On Tue, Feb 09, 2010 at 03:21:15AM +0000, Ben Hutchings wrote:
> On Mon, 2010-02-08 at 18:15 +0100, Max Vozeler wrote:
> > Please consider including the USB/IP drivers from the
> > staging directory:
> >
> > CONFIG_USB_IP_COMMON=m
> > CONFIG_USB_IP_VHCI_HCD=m
> > CONFIG_USB_IP_HOST=m
> >
> > As I understand, the drivers remain in staging not so much
> > because of quality issues but due to discussions about the
> > userspace API, which may still change.
>
> The implementation is questionable too.
Could you point me to related discussions or things you
noticed which look odd?
> > The only users of the API which exist today are the usbip
> > userspace tools through libusbip0. It should be possible to
> > adapt those if/when the API changes.
> >
> > If these modules were provided in linux-2.6, we could drop
> > the usbip-source module package.
>
> Given that this is not needed for hardware support, I would like to see
> a good reason for including it.
OK. Let me try to give a balanced view:
The drivers provide a new and experimental feature,
which has gotten to the point of being usable in some
limited but practical scenarios.
One I've been working on is remote access to hardware
security modules from within virtual machines.
There are still limitations that make it unsuitable
for less specialized setups. Device reconnects are not
handeled transparently yet, for example.
Other limitations lie in the usbip userspace tools, the
most important probably being the lack of authorization
for access to the usbip daemon.
Despite these limitations, there are people wanting to
use usbip in setups where the limitations don't matter
or can be worked around (e.g. using IPSec transport).
So that's why I think is is useful to have.
Now about whether to enable it in linux-2.6 or ship it
as a separate module source package (usbip-source).
The drivers have so far been developed in two places,
one being the usbip svn repo at sourceforce, the other
the mainline staging tree.
This has led to diverging and usbip upstream is now
starting to move the driver development away from the
separate svn repo towards doing it in the staging tree.
So in the future the usbip-source module package will
be mostly a copy of the drivers from staging.
Including it in linux-2.6 would likely allow us to drop
the separate usbip-source package, make it easier for
users to get the modules and keep them updated.
I don't think these are really strong reasons for
including it in linux-2.6 vs. having the module package
considering that it is experimental and niche enough
to only be interesting to relatively few people.
On the other hand, since staging is going to be where
the development happens, it seems that it is also the
best place to build the modules from.
Hope that gives you a basis for deciding about whether
to include it or keep it separate.
Max
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