On Tue, Sep 19, 2000 at 05:14:39PM -0700, David S. Miller wrote:
> Date: Tue, 19 Sep 2000 18:07:20 -0600
> From: Cort Dougan <cort@fsmlabs.com>
>
> Do you really think that's forcing people to concentrate of fixing
> bugs? Tell me if you disagree, I'd like to understand how you see
> that. I see that 2.4 is getting all kinds of changes merged in
> that should be going on with 2.5. The recent VM changes have left
> us with deadlocks that we didn't have before. Shouldn't that have
> gone into 2.5 not 2.4?
>
> The VM performance in 2.4.x was a major regression from 2.2.x and is
> required to be fixed for 2.4.0 release. Riel did the bulk of this
> work, and it's now just dealing with a few remaining details on very
> low memory systems. His changes fixed a major problem, and
> structurally I believe his changes are completely sound and were
> justifiably included in 2.4.x.
>
> So I think this was a bad example.
Well, I think the bitterness comes from (partily anyways) it going into
2.4.0-test9-pre1, along with other seemingly large updates, which did need
to go in but really don't sound right for a -test. I guess Linus didn't want
to see 2.3.1xx like we did with 2.1. But the 2.2.0-testX patches seemed like
small stuff (maybe my memory just sucks tho).
> I'll say this much, if 2.5.x existed I'd be spending most of my time
> on a clean zero-copy TCP framework instead of walking over the net
> stack and sparc64 code verifying things every day, that is for sure.
> So yes, I am really thinking that it is forcing people to concentrate
> on fixing bugs, because at least it is doing so for me. I know that
> the faster 2.4.x happens the faster the "fun" 2.5.x stuff comes along.
What Cort didn't mention is that at least some of this fun experimental stuff
is things like better support for new machines, along with bug fixing for 2.4
(ie people can use all their PCI cards without resource conflicts again).
-- Tom Rini (TR1265) http://gate.crashing.org/~trini/ - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
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