Re: [PATCH 6.3 00/13] 6.3.12-rc1 review

[Mike Kravetz]

On 07/04/23 13:28, Greg Kroah-Hartman wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 04, 2023 at 11:56:11AM +0200, Thorsten Leemhuis wrote:
> > On 04.07.23 10:47, Greg Kroah-Hartman wrote:
> > > On Tue, Jul 04, 2023 at 02:13:03PM +0530, Harshit Mogalapalli wrote:
> > >> On 04/07/23 1:54 pm, Greg Kroah-Hartman wrote:
> > >>>>> While running LTP hugetlb testing on x86 the following kernel BUG noticed
> > >>>>> on running stable-rc 6.3.12-rc1.
> > >>
> > >> Have you looked at Patch 9 of this series:
> > >>
> > >> https://lore.kernel.org/stable/2023070416-wow-phrasing-b92c@gregkh/T/#m12068530e846ac8b9668bd83941d82ec3f22ac15
> > >>
> > >> Looks very much related, it also has a note on Backporting.
> > >> As I think it could be related, I am sharing this.(But haven't tested
> > >> anything)
> > > 
> > > Yes, that's the offending patch.  I should have read over the full
> > > changelogs before doing bisection, but bisection/test proved that this
> > > was not correct for 6.3.y at this point in time.
> > 
> > FWIW, I'm preparing a few small tweaks for
> > Documentation/process/stable-kernel-rules.rst (to be submitted after the
> > merge window). I among others consider adding something like this that
> > might help avoiding this situation:
> > 
> > ```
> > To delay pick up of patches submitted via :ref:`option_1`, use the
> > following format:
> > 
> > .. code-block:: none
> > 
> >      Cc: <stable@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> # after 4 weeks in mainline
> > 
> > For any other requests related to patches submitted via :ref:`option_1`,
> > just add a note to the stable tag. This for example can be used to point
> > out known problems:
> > 
> > .. code-block:: none
> > 
> >      Cc: <stable@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> # see patch description, needs
> > adjustments for 6.3 and earlier
> > 
> > ```
> > 
> > Greg, if this is stupid or in case you want it to say something else,
> > just say so.
> 
> That looks great, hopefully people notice this.  We still have a huge
> number of people refusing to even put cc: stable in a patch, let alone
> these extra hints :)

We were trying to follow "Option 2" of the stable rules with this patch.
Because of the issue with 6.3.y, cc: stable was intentionally left off the
upstream patch.  And, after the patch was in Linus's tree a 6.3.y specific
version was sent:
https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20230629211817.194786-1-sidhartha.kumar@xxxxxxxxxx/

To complicate matters, a bug was found and fixed in the upstream patch during
this process.

Apologies if things were not done correctly.
-- 
Mike Kravetz