Re: [git pull request] ACPI Processor Aggregator Driver for 2.6.32-rc1

Linus Torvalds
2009-10-05T23:25:08Z

On Mon, 5 Oct 2009, Andrew Morton wrote:
>
> But it's all too late now, isn't it. This is the first time that
> non-linux-acpi readers knew of the existence of this driver.

Why do people even care? This driver is not going to be used in any
situation where any regular person will _ever_ care. And if you don't
like it, you don't have to enable it at all.

That driver is ACPI-specific, is not very complex, is marked EXPERIMENTAL,
and everybody including Len has said that _if_ the scheduler people can
ever solve it at that level, it would be good. But as it is, it has
NOTHING to do with the scheduler, and why _should_ any non-ACPI people
know about the existence of that driver?

In fact, the only reason the scheduler people even know about it is that
Len at first tried to do something more invasive, and was shot down. Now
it's just a driver, and the scheduler people can _try_ to do it some other
way if they really care, but that's _their_ problem. Not the driver.

In the meantime, I personally suspect we probably never want to even try
to solve it in the scheduler, because why the hell should we care and add
complex logic for something like that? At least not until we end up having
the same issue on some other architecture too, and it turns from a hacky
ACPI thing into something more.

As it is, the driver is entirely self-contained and doesn't affect any
other subsystem.

Linus