On Tue, 2018-05-22 at 14:56 -0600, Jason Gunthorpe wrote:
> On Tue, May 22, 2018 at 01:38:31PM -0700, Jeff Kirsher wrote:
> > From: Sindhu Devale <sindhu.devale@intel.com>
> > 
> > Currently i40iw is dependent on i40e symbols
> > i40e_register_client and i40e_unregister_client due to
> > which i40iw cannot be loaded without i40e being loaded.
> > 
> > This patch allows RDMA driver to build and load without
> > linking to LAN driver and without LAN driver being loaded
> > first. Once the LAN driver is loaded, the RDMA driver
> > is notified through the netdevice notifiers to register
> > as client to the LAN driver. Add function pointers to IDC
> > register/unregister in the private VSI structure. This
> > allows a RDMA driver to build without linking to i40e.
> 
> Why would you want to do this? The rdma driver is non-functional
> without the ethernet driver, so why on earth would we want to defeat
> the module dependency mechanism?

This change is driven by the OSV's like Red Hat, where customer's were
updating the i40e driver, which in turn broke i40iw.