RFC: Removing hpt* drivers from GENERIC

[Baptiste Daroussin]

On Thu, Oct 26, 2017 at 03:12:57AM +0100, Andrew Turner wrote:
> 
> > On 25 Oct 2017, at 22:43, Colin Percival <cperciva at tarsnap.com> wrote:
> > 
> > Hi developers,
> > 
> > I'd like to remove the hpt* drivers from GENERIC.  These are the drivers
> > for the HighPoint storage hardware -- SATA (hptnr) and RAID (hpt27xx, hptiop,
> > hptmv, hptrr).
> > 
> > My reason for wanting to remove them is that the hpt27xx and hptnr drivers
> > spend ~150 ms in their DEVICE_PROBE routines every time the system boots.
> > Since they are roughly 1000x slower than the median driver, this is clearly
> > excessive; unfortunately the time is being spent inside a binary blob, so
> > there is no apparent way to fix the drivers.  (The other three drives from
> > the same vendor -- hptiop, hptmv, and hptrr -- don't exhibit this particular
> > bug, but I don't see any strong argument in favour of not removing them along
> > with the two problem drivers.)
> > 
> > All of these are available via kernel modules, so the impact upon users
> > should be minimal.  Obviously I would not plan on MFCing this change.
> > 
> > Any objections?
GOGOGO
> 
> Why are we building these binary blobs into the kernel? We don’t have the source for these so it’s more difficult to audit them for security issues. If the user wishes to load them as modules they are fine to do that, however I don’t think we shouldn’t be linking any of these blobs in a GENERIC kernel.

I totally agree here!

Bapt
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