Re: [PATCH 2/2] nvme: add emulation for zone-append

[David Fugate]

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.GB3518@xxxxxx/ 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.