On 9/4/21 13:58, Odintsov Vladislav wrote: > And one more question: > > What is the reason to deprecate OOT kmod? > It’s very comfortable to have an ability to upgrade openvswitch modules > separately from the kernel. In case of any bug or requirement for a new > feature, we just updated OVN/OVS and kmod-openvswitch and reloaded them. To > update kernel on a hypervisors requires much more work: put host into > maintenance (avacuate VMs), upgrade, reboot, put back from maintenance. And > upgrading the kernel requires full retesting with other components: storage, > virtualization, etc...
Hi, Vladislav. The main reason for deprecation is a maintenance cost from the OVS development perspective. Support of the OOT kernel module requires a lot of testing with different kernel versions. Backporting of new features from the upstream kernel is harder than developing in many cases, because not only new features needs to be backported, but also parts of the generic kernel infrastructure that doesn't exist in older kernels. And at the moment of deprecation, upstream kernel already supported several features not available in the OOT module. How many people are actually using it is also unclear. Questions were asked on a mail list and also during the last OVS conference. And during a few months while the question was up for discussion, there were literally no replies from anyone who uses OOT module. So, support looked more like a waste of time. One more thing that contributes to the lack of users is that enterprise distributions does not typically support systems with third-party kernel modules. From the maintenance point of view, if you want a quick bug fix, I think, you can still get sources of your running kernel, patch and re-build the openvswitch module and re-load it to the currently running kernel. This is not that convenient, but should be possible. This can help as a hot fix until the next maintenance window, where you can do a proper kernel update. Best regards, Ilya Maximets. _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list [email protected] https://mail.openvswitch.org/mailman/listinfo/ovs-discuss
