Re: [edk2-devel] [Patch 1/2] OvmfPkg: Change default to disable MptScsi and PvScsi

["Ard Biesheuvel" <ardb@kernel.org>]

On Wed, 7 Dec 2022 at 08:41, Gerd Hoffmann <kraxel@redhat.com> wrote:
>
>   Hi,
>
> > A patch mentioned above set MPT_SCSI_ENABLE=FALSE, that removed
> > support for LSI 53C1030 and SAS1068.
> > These SCSI controllers were emulated  by VMware, Parallels and I guess
> > VitualBox.
> > This is generic setup for VMware VMs, as far as I remember.
> > So the booting of such VMs (probably migrated from VMware  and others)
> > was definitely broken.
>
> Yes.  Problem is there is no maintainer for the driver.  There used to
> be one, but the email address started bouncing.  So we updated
> Maintainers.txt and flipped the switch to not build the unmaintained
> drivers by default.
>
> If debian is fine with shipping unmaintained software to its users you
> can flip the config switches of course, at least as long as the drivers
> are still in the tree.  The drivers are at risk of being removed though
> in case we don't find a new maintainer within a year or two.
>

Indeed. These options can be set from the command line when building
the image, so the distro wrapper scripts can just en/disable the
features they desire.

As for maintenance: indeed, lack of maintainership generally also
means lack of testing coverage, and if something breaks, we won't
notice, and if we do, we may not be able to fix it without running the
risk of breaking something else.

So at some point, these drivers will be removed rather than kept alive
by the core team unless someone steps up.