On Fri, Nov 13, 2020 at 01:06:48PM +0000, Rojewski, Cezary wrote:

> For a very long time upstream was filled with "flavors" of drivers for
> Intel solutions. Having three available for BYT is a very good example
> of that. The division of what goes where wasn't exactly explicit either.
> This all leads to confusion - while community and users may feel
> confused about what's recommended and what they should actually be
> using, surprisingly (unsurprisingly?) developers were too.

...

> Patchset presented here goes directly against that goal. We, Intel
> developers, are tasked with providing reliable, working solutions
> exposing best possible experience for our customers when dealing with
> our products. And thus solutions provided are called recommended. We
> don't deal with flavors and try-it-out-on-your-own-risk.

My feeling here was that this is helping with this goal in that it's not
changing the defaults but is rather pushing the decision making process
from build time to runtime.  This means that distributions are able to
ship the preferred implementations for all the platforms without causing
any issues for the hopefully small set of users who need or want to work
on a different firmware, if they've been doing something like sticking
with an alternative firmware for old users since things were working
they'll be able to smoothly transition over to the current recommended
default, eg leaving old users on the old firmware by default.  That's a
bit of a niche use case but then hopefully all use cases for selecting a
non-default firmware are niche.

It also means that people don't have to think about this so much at
build time, they can just turn everything on and not worry they'll cause
problems for people using the binary and still get the recommended
runtime behaviour by default unless the user actively does something.

At any rate I'm not clear that I see this actively causing problems.