On Wed, 2020-08-19 at 13:25 -0600, Jens Axboe wrote: > It's not required, the driver will function quite fine without it. If > you > want to use ZNS it's required.
The NVMe spec does not require Zone Append for ZNS; a *vendor-neutral* Linux driver should not either. > The Linux driver thankfully doesn't need > any vendor to sign off on what it can or cannot do, or what features > are acceptable. The problem is the driver needs one *particular* vendor to sign off. Existing driver behavior aligns with WDC drives instead of the spec, giving WDC an unfair advantage. Couple this with NVMe maintainer(s?) working for WDC, and there's a conflict of interest. > It's *always* ok to reject contributions, if those contributions > cause > maintainability issues, unacceptable slowdowns, or whatever other > issue > that the maintainers of said driver don't want to deal with. Any > contribution should be judged on merit, not based on political > decisions > or opinions. Agreed, but this standard needs to be applied equally to everyone. E.g., harmless contributions such as https://lore.kernel.org/linux-nvme/20200611054156.gb3...@lst.de/ get rejected yet clear spec violations from maintainers are accepted? This type of behavior encourages forking, vendor-specific drivers, etc. which is somewhere I hope none of us want to go.