From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: David Mosberger Date: Tue, 27 Nov 2001 20:38:31 +0000 Subject: [Linux-ia64] what's up with 2.5? Message-Id: List-Id: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit To: linux-ia64@vger.kernel.org OK, various people are justly wondering how 2.4 and 2.5 are going to be maintained etc. Here are some of my thoughts. I'd appreciate your thoughts: - For the time being, I'm willing to maintain both 2.4 and 2.5. This assumes that 2.4 will rev infrequently. If 2.4 revs too frequently, I'd appreciate help. - The big issue on my mind is how we're going to handle McKinley. Even if Linus planned to do so, it's extremely unlikely that 2.6 will happen before McKinley is out. I believe there are really two separate issues here: McKinley support per se and NUMA support. From what I can tell, we should be able to support McKinley in 2.4 *without* NUMA quite easily. My sense is that the NUMA related changes will be quite broad. Thus, I suggest that we initially focus on 2.5 for this. As McKinley gets closer, perhaps some of the NUMA-motivated changes can be back ported to 2.4. - My first priority is to get the remaining platform-independent differences integrated into the official Linus tree. The obvious goal being that it should (finally) become possible to build an ia64 kernel out of the box. - There are many things that can be improved in ia64 linux. I believe the optimizing the system call path, experimenting with superpage (and perhaps subpage) mappings, and experimenting with better TLB sharing are all fruitful directions to consider. I have a pretty good idea of what can and should be done with the syscall path and am planning to work on that as soon as I can find some time. Comments? --david