Re: Linux 6.2-rc1

[Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>]

On Wed, Jan 4, 2023 at 11:01 AM Pali Rohár <pali@kernel.org> wrote:
>
> Driver is still used and userspace tools for it are part of the udftools
> project, which is still under active maintenance. More people already
> informed me about this "surprise".

Why is that driver used?

It's *literally* pointless. It's just a shell that forwards ioctl's to
the real drivers.

> Any comments on this? Because until now nobody answered why this
> actively used driver was removed from kernel without informing anybody:

Well, it's been marked as deprecated for five years, so any kernel
config should have gotten this notice for the help entry

          Note: This driver is deprecated and will be removed from the
          kernel in the near future!

but I guess people didn't notice.

It could be re-instated, but it really is a completely useless driver.
Just use the *regular* device nodes, not the pointless pktcd ones.

Is there any real reason why udftools can't just use the normal device node?

The historical reason for this driver being pointless goes back *much*
longer than five years - it used to be that the pktcd driver was
special, and was the only thing that did raw commands.

But the regular block layer was taught to do that back around 2004, so
the "pktcd" driver has literally just been a pointless shell for
almost two decades.

And I know it was in 2004, because I actually did most of that "make
SCSI commands generic" work myself (but had to go back to the old BK
archives to find the exact date - it's been two decades, after all).

I did it because I was fed up with the crazy pktcd driver requiring
extra work, when I just wanted to write CD's on my regular IDE CD-ROM
the obvious way.

So if there is some reason to actually use the pktcd driver, please
tell us what that is.

              Linus