0) I've tried to get a trivial patch upstream. It silences a build time
warning generated by the advansys driver:
- November 2012:
https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/11/5/164 ;
- January 2013:
https://lkml.org/lkml/2013/1/29/144 ; and
- January 2014:
https://lkml.org/lkml/2014/1/8/569 .
That patch seems to be going nowhere. So a kernel build still generates
a warning when this driver is included. After seven years that is
getting pointless.
1) It seems that advansys is unmaintained. The last time its maintainer
touched it - by acking a patch - was in 2008, with commit 25729a7fb88e
("[SCSI] advansys, arcmsr, ipr, nsp32, qla1280, stex: use
pci_ioremap_bar()").
Advansys boards should also be quite old by now. I _guess_ they were
produced until a decade ago. On the other hand, there still could be a
few users left, see:
-
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=844390 (July 2012); and
-
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=558231 (January 2010).
Other evidence of actual use in Fedora is much older. The most recent I
could find was
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=162431 (July
2005). And I don't think nine year old reports are very relevant.
3) Is it acceptable for Fedora to remove advansys from
config-x86-generic? Or would my trivial patch - or something like it -
be acceptable? Either way, I'd like to be able to finally drop my local
patch.
Paul Bolle