Intel’s Networking Division (ND) has long maintained two versions of their drivers: the out-of-tree driver that supports their hardware (within reason) on older kernels, and the upstream driver that is maintained in the kernel.
One problem that this raises is how to keep the two drivers in sync without duplicating work. For the i40e driver, some changes were made to the existing build processes to solve this problem. This presentation will explore the new processes and the improvements that have been seen from them, as well as the pitfalls that still exist.
This is a follow-up presentation to “Developing Out-of-Tree Drivers alongside In-Kernel Drivers” by Jesse Brandeburg.
