David, sorry for the late response. I agree that with stable versions the driver version is not good indication for which exact code is running. however, we have many users that port the latest ena driver as-is from kernel sources into their older kernels, mainly to pull new ENA features (e.g. low latency queues). for those cases, the driver version helps us to identify the driver's code, so in practice this just works fine.
saeed From: David Miller <[email protected]> Sent: Tuesday, February 12, 2019 9:06 PM To: Kiyanovski, Arthur Cc: [email protected]; Woodhouse, David; Machulsky, Zorik; Matushevsky, Alexander; Bshara, Saeed; Wilson, Matt; Liguori, Anthony; Bshara, Nafea; Tzalik, Guy; Belgazal, Netanel; Saidi, Ali Subject: Re: [PATCH V1 net 0/2] net: ena: race condition bug fix and version update From: <[email protected]> Date: Mon, 11 Feb 2019 19:17:42 +0200 > From: Arthur Kiyanovski <[email protected]> > > This patchset includes a fix to a race condition that can cause > kernel panic, as well as a driver version update because of this > fix. Series applied and patch #1 queued up for -stable. But I want to reiterate what Andrew said, the version is so increibly useless and stupid. I'm going to submit the fix to -stable, and then people will then doubly and triply have no relationship between driver version number and what fixes exist.
