2.6.37-rc5: well done, thanks!

From: Martin Steigerwald
Date: Wed Dec 15 2010 - 08:22:01 EST


Hi!

I think when I complain about kernel quality its also important to say,
when I perceive it got better again[1].

Well it has. I am especially fond of 2.6.37-rc5[2] cause it even got
noticably faster on my laptop - likely related to the tighter integration
of Ext4 into the block layer and the replacement of barriers by Cache/FUA
requests. Tab completion under I/O load has gotten noticably faster.

But more important the reported bugs I mentioned are fixed:

- bug 15969 by Jerome Glisse
- bug 15788 by Alan Stern

Alex Deucher fixed the radeon DRM/KMS freeze bug #16376 which was the tip
on the ice berg. I didn't even report back then cause I didn't have much
to report other than that it freezes randomly. I bisected it down to about
10 revisions while some other guys did it on a freedesktop bug report[3].

There are some issues here and there, I reported them. I asked what to do
if reports receive no reaction and started bringing up some here on the
kernel mailing list. I think I will ping some more specific mailing lists
for some of them as I tend to believe that bugzilla is a good way to track
issues, but not a good way to contact the right people about them,
especially as it does only accept mail addresses of bugzilla account
owners in the Cc field and the default assignee may not always be up to
date. I will to ask about and resolve this on a per bug report base.

But overall I am quite happy with the current state of affairs.

And before someone mentions it: I know its subjective perception (which is
what matters for my usage of Linux).

[1] http://lkml.org/lkml/2010/7/11/17

[2] Yes, I compile and test rc kernels now ;)

[3] https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=28402

Thanks,
--
Martin 'Helios' Steigerwald - http://www.Lichtvoll.de
GPG: 03B0 0D6C 0040 0710 4AFA B82F 991B EAAC A599 84C7

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