Re: AIM7 40% regression with 2.6.26-rc1

[Linus Torvalds]

On Wed, 7 May 2008, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> 
> Quite frankly, maybe we _need_ to have a bad BKL for those to ever get 
> fixed. As it was, people worked on trying to make the BKL behave better, 
> and it was a failure. Rather than spend the effort on trying to make it 
> work better (at a horrible cost), why not just say "Hell no - if you have 
> issues with it, you need to work with people to get rid of the BKL 
> rather than cluge around it".

Put another way: if we had introduced the BKL-as-semaphore with a known 
40% performance drop in AIM7, I would simply never ever have accepted the 
patch in the first place, regardless of _any_ excuses. 

Performance is a feature too.

Now, just because the code is already merged should not be an excuse for 
it then being shown to be bad. It's not a valid excuse to say "but we 
already merged it, so we can't unmerge it". We sure as hell _can_ unmerge 
it. 

			Linus
--
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at  http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at  http://www.tux.org/lkml/