[dpdk-dev] New driver (large patch) question.

Thomas Monjalon thomas.monjalon at 6wind.com
Wed Mar 2 23:15:58 CET 2016


2016-03-02 14:06, Stephen Hurd:
> The issue is that the big header in question is the whole hardware/firmware
> interface definition.  The comments in it are the only publicly available
> documentation on the hardware I'm aware of.

So you must keep the comments.

> The driver itself doesn't have a lot of optional features in it, it's the
> header file that's too big.

It is big because there are many different things.
You can split the file in different patches.
Examples:
	- a patch for RSS will bring the hardware structures for RSS
	- a patch for the stats will bring the hardware stats structures
	etc

PS: please answer inline

 
> On Wed, Mar 2, 2016 at 1:54 PM, Thomas Monjalon <thomas.monjalon at 6wind.com>
> wrote:
> 
> > 2016-03-02 13:30, Stephen Hurd:
> > > The bulk of the patch is the hardware interface header file.  With all
> > the
> > > comments, it weighs in around 800k.  If I strip the comments, it's around
> > > 300k.  If I both strip all the comments and remove all the currently
> > unused
> > > structures, I can get the entire patch down just below 300k, but that
> > makes
> > > it much harder for someone to do further development.  I'm willing to do
> > > that though if it's what's preferred.
> > >
> > > The other large file (560k) is just a bunch of extra debug output that
> > > makes it easier to debug issues.  It's normally not compiled, so it
> > sounds
> > > like it's not wanted either.
> >
> > If the code is not needed, it's obviously better to not submit it :)
> >
> > > I'll submit without comments in the hardware interface file and take it
> > > from there.
> >
> > I don't think removing the comments is a good option.
> > Please try to split per-feature to make it readable.
> > You can check how fm10k was introduced as an example:
> >         http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.networking.dpdk.devel/13447
> > or mlx5:
> >         http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.networking.dpdk.devel/26986
> >
> 
> 
> 
> 




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