Re: Obsolete features (was Re: [PATCH 0/4] minio cleanup patches.)

On 7/20/26 5:33 PM, Benjamin Marzinski wrote:

> On Sun, Jul 19, 2026 at 04:57:00PM +0200, Xose Vazquez Perez wrote:

>> Another candidate to drop is the retain_attached_hw_handler infrastructure:
>>   ( grep -Eir "hwhandler|hw_handler" )
>> Since Linux 4.3, the kernel always enforces "retain_attached_hw_handler yes".
>> Because this option is completely obsolete, could it be dropped from multipath-tools?

> I'm never sure how far back we need to support kernels. I could easily
> be convinced that we don't need to worry about kernels before 4.3 with
> the latest upstream code. If we still do care about 4.2, I would also be
> open to deprecating the option, and just always having it set to yes.


Only enterprise distributions with extended/long-term support use kernels
older than 4.3:

* SLES 11-SP4: 3.0
* RHEL 7: 3.10
* Ubuntu 14.04 LTS: 3.13
(Note that even CIP long-term kernel starts at 4.4)


Furthermore, the code handling older kernel behavior for hw_handler is
still properly maintained in the respective stable branches of
multipath-tools: stable-0.10.y through stable-0.15.y

Regards.