On 7/20/26 5:33 PM, Benjamin Marzinski wrote:
On Sun, Jul 19, 2026 at 04:57:00PM +0200, Xose Vazquez Perez wrote:
Another candidate to drop is the retain_attached_hw_handler infrastructure: ( grep -Eir "hwhandler|hw_handler" ) Since Linux 4.3, the kernel always enforces "retain_attached_hw_handler yes". Because this option is completely obsolete, could it be dropped from multipath-tools?
I'm never sure how far back we need to support kernels. I could easily be convinced that we don't need to worry about kernels before 4.3 with the latest upstream code. If we still do care about 4.2, I would also be open to deprecating the option, and just always having it set to yes.
Only enterprise distributions with extended/long-term support use kernels older than 4.3: * SLES 11-SP4: 3.0 * RHEL 7: 3.10 * Ubuntu 14.04 LTS: 3.13 (Note that even CIP long-term kernel starts at 4.4) Furthermore, the code handling older kernel behavior for hw_handler is still properly maintained in the respective stable branches of multipath-tools: stable-0.10.y through stable-0.15.y Regards.
