Re: [GIT PULL] KVM updates for the 2.6.38 merge window

[Avi Kivity <avi@redhat.com>]

On 01/11/2011 06:19 PM, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 11, 2011 at 1:25 AM, Avi Kivity<avi@redhat.com>  wrote:
>> What are your issues with the patch?
> My issues are mainly two-fold:
>
>   - I think "MINOR" is a totally idiotic and meaningless term. It has
> no technical meaning. Why would IO be special? Is it because of
> deadlock concerns with filesystem or block device layer locks? No. And
> it clearly isn't about "sleeping", since a major fault can be
> non-sleeping (think ramdisk, for example).
>
>     Look at the other FAULT_FLAG_xyzzy flags. They have _hard_
> technical reasons. There's no ambiguity. And we ALREADY HAVE the one
> that says "return if it would need to wait", and it's called
> FAULT_FLAG_ALLOW_RETRY.
>

Okay; I'll drop that patch, and look at reusing the existing infrastructure.

> The other issue is:
>
>   - I wasn't aware of this, and clearly not enough other people were
> either, or somebody would have told you that we already had people
> working on the whole FAULT_FLAG_ALLOW_RETRY thing that is much fancier
> and technically superior.
>
> So it simply boils down to the fact that I don't think
> FAULT_FLAG_MAJOR was a good idea. It's badly done, is a total and
> utter hack, and I don't see why I should ever merge it.

And I'll improve the process on core patches as well.