Re: [PATCH -v18 00/37] Use lmb with x86

[Benjamin Herrenschmidt <benh@kernel.crashing.org>]

On Tue, 2010-06-15 at 23:10 -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> On Tuesday, June 15, 2010, Yinghai Lu <yinghai@kernel.org> wrote:
> >
> >  46 files changed, 1476 insertions(+), 1282 deletions(-)
> 
> So what was the advantage again? It's adding more lines than it
> removes. Wasn't the point to simplify things, not make them bigger?

I -think- the point is that once that's done, you can remove a whole lot
of gunk that was added such as the kernel/range.c caca, etc...
(basically, x86 gunk gratuituously made generic and that should really
just die instead).

However, I do have some issues with some aspects of Yinghai port to x86,
where instead of removing the old crap, it adds a layer that turns the
LMB into that old crap which is then turned back into something else...
not too sure, it's definitely a bit weird.

So using LMB per-se is a good idea, because it replaces whatever other
range management/allocator you have there. But it has to be done "right"
and I think we need Thomas, Ingo and/or Peter to give that a good look
and see whether what we have there is "right" or not as far as x86 is
concerned.

Cheers,
Ben.