PECI patchset status

[Joel Stanley]

Hello OpenBMCers,

The PECI patchset has been carried in the openbmc tree in some form
since it was first posted in December 2017.

It has not made it upstream in that time, placing the maintenance
burden on me as the kernel maintainer. Generally this isn't a large
amount of work, although in some cases it has held up releasing kernel
branches. Today I noticed that the icotl number it chose has been
claimed by a different ioctl in linux-next, meaning we are guaranteed
to have future kernel/userspace incompatibility.

OpenBMC has strong rules about upstreaming kernel patches, and in
particular userspace facing code, to avoid this issue.

Given the lack of progress I propose dropping it from the OpenBMC
kernel tree until it is merged upstream. This would necessitate
removing tiogapass from the OpenBMC CI, as it relies on PECI support
in the kernel to build.

If you have an interest in the patchset staying in openbmc, we would
need someone (or a team) to take the patchset (v11 is the latest[1])
and submit for inclusion in the mainline kernel, including an entry in
MAINTAINERS to commit to future maintenance. Now is the perfect time
to submit for inclusion in 5.10.

[1] https://lore.kernel.org/linux-hwmon/20191211194624.2872-1-jae.hyun.yoo@linux.intel.com/

Cheers,

Joel