[Linux-ia64] what's up with 2.5?

David Mosberger
2001-11-27T20:38:31Z

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