open-vm-tools in base

[Warner Losh]

On Fri, Jan 10, 2020 at 11:38 AM Steve Kargl <
sgk at troutmask.apl.washington.edu> wrote:

> On Fri, Jan 10, 2020 at 10:44:38AM -0700, Warner Losh wrote:
> > On Fri, Jan 10, 2020 at 10:26 AM Steve Kargl <
> > sgk at troutmask.apl.washington.edu> wrote:
> >
> > > On Fri, Jan 10, 2020 at 09:55:23AM -0600, Josh Paetzel wrote:
> > > >
> > > > There is some precedent for this.  Driver(s?) that were once a
> > > >  part of the tools have been moved to base already.  The VMXNET3
> > > > driver is an example of this.
> > > >
> > >
> > > There is also precedent for removing a working driver from
> > > base and putting it into ports.  See drm2.
> > >
> >
> > Not the best example to cite as there's been a lot of bumps with that and
> > the future distribution model is unclear to me.
> >
>
> Oddly enough I disagree. :-)
>

You're not on the front lines of fighting the impedance mismatch between
package builds, -current changes and ports that depend a bit too much on
our internals, either implicitly or explicitly. :)


> Does the problems for open-vm-tools occur in freebsd-stable,
> where the kernel ABI should be stable?
>

Except they aren't. virtualbox's kmod have issues as does kms-drm because
we have no tools to test our KBI stability, so we encode a lot of internal
junk we shouldn't and that causes breakages on the branch that are tricky
to even known exist.


> Freebsd-current is the development tree, and kernel changes
> might break 3rd party software.  drm2 is a perfect example.
> In-base drm2 was working just fine and kept up-to-date with
> kernel changes when it was attached to the build.  This seems
> to be what Josh wants for open-vm-tools.  Once drm2 was detached
> from the build it was ocassionally broken, and someone (often
> times me) would find and report the breakage.  If open-vm-tools
> is added to base, and then someone adds emulators/open-vm-tools-devel
> which supercedes in-base open-vm-tool, we're back to the in-base drm2
> situation.
>

The notion is that we'd not do that. It would all be in base.


> Finally, open-vm-tools is used by what percentage of FreeBSD users?
> 1%? 5%? 50%?
>

Without real data, it's hard to say. What percentage of people in FreeBSD
use the ahd driver these days? I'll bet it's a lot less than would use this.

Warner