Re: [PATCH net-next v12 00/13] Add support for PSE budget evaluation strategy

[Andrew Lunn <andrew@lunn.ch>]

> I think that in theory the userspace patches need to be posted together
> with the kernel, from maintainer-netdev.rst:
> 
> 	User space code exercising kernel features should be posted
> 	alongside kernel patches. This gives reviewers a chance to see
> 	how any new interface is used and how well it works.
> 
> I am not sure if that's really the case though.

The ethtool Maintainer tends to wait to the end of the cycle to pick
up all patches and then applies and releases a new ethtool binary. The
same applies for iproute2. That means the CI tests are not capable of
testing new features using ethtool. I'm also not sure if it needs a
human to update the ethtool binary on the CI systems, and how active
that human is. Could this be changed, sure, if somebody has the needed
bandwidth.

Using the APIs directly via ynl python is possible in CI, since that
is all in tree, as far as i know. However, ethtool is the primary user
tool, so i do see having tests for it as useful. But they might need
to wait for a cycle, or at least fail gracefully until the ethtool
binary is updated.

	Andrew