Re: Patch "sched: Give CPU bound RT tasks preference" has been addedto the 2.6.32-longterm tree

From: Ingo Molnar
Date: Wed Feb 16 2011 - 04:22:40 EST



[ about -stable merge policy ]

* Jiri Slaby <jirislaby@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> > We try to concentrate on regression fixes though.
>
> Hi, I cannot fully agree with this. The question is who are "we" here?

It's the upstream policy and the scheduler tree certainly follows it.

I think i remember Linus having stated it before (cannot find the mail), but it's
pretty common-sense so easy to reproduce (i've Cc:-ed Linus in case he wants to
chime in):

The idea is to treat Linus's tree and -stable as an organic whole: so -stable
is upstream as well, but with *bug* fixes backported. It's emphatically not a
separate "for backporting interesting/important bits" tree.

And as such whatever a maintainer can send to Linus in -rc's (in particular late
-rc's) is -stable eligible.

For the rest of patches: generally not eligible, but with common-sense
exceptions.

"It's a nice patch" or "it will obviously not cause problems" or "this is
important to us" does not make a patch eligible for -stable.

Adding a -stable tag to a commit and *not* sending it to Linus for the next -rc
also makes a patch almost automatically *not* eligible: if it was not important
enough to have it in the next -rc then it's doubly not eligible for -stable ...

I think this common-sense rule is easy to follow:

" If you ever have to ask yourself whether a patch queued up for -stable is
really -stable eligible it probably isnt. "

It's called -stable for a reason.

Thanks,

Ingo
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