Re: [PATCH 0/7] ide: locking improvements

[Bartlomiej Zolnierkiewicz <bzolnier@gmail.com>]

On Saturday 11 October 2008, Jens Axboe wrote:
> On Sat, Oct 11 2008, Borislav Petkov wrote:
> > > >From my perspective the main gain of these patches is the increased
> > > maintainability and sanity of the code, scalability improvements are
> > > just an added bonus.
> > 
> > and better code/improved scalability is a bad thing because... ?!
> 
> It's a bad thing because nobody on earth cares about IDE scalability,

JFYI: just yesterday I got mail proving otherwise. ;)

> from a performance POV a modern SATA controller is just better on
> several levels. I don't think anybody cares about IDE scaling on 8-16
> cores or more, simply because NOBODY is using IDE on such systems.
> 
> As such, trying to improve locking is a pointless exercise. And that is
> a bad thing, because code change invariably brings in code bugs. Then
> see previous mail on lack of coverage testing, and it can naturally be
> harmful.

Your concerns were already addressed in my reply but I worry that having
a discussion based on technical arguments is not your goal.

Just to repeat: these patches are not hardware specific and obviously
they are not going to be merged today, tomorrow or in a week (they are
2.6.29 material after months of time in pata tree / linux-next).

> > > > rather like putting makeup on a corpse to me..
> > 
> > so _NOT_ true.
> 
> Depends on what you think is the corpse. Since IDE is essentially dead
> and frozen, it IS a corpse and the phrase is then very appropriate. This
> is not a personal jab at the IDE guys and does not reflect on the
> (mostly) good work they do, just a reflection on the state of IDE in
> general.

Interesting statement given that i.e. diffstat-wise pata tree has more
than twice as much stuff queued up for 2.6.28 than "some other" trees
(and we have history of being a _very_ conservative w.r.t. to needlessly
moving code around in drivers/ide/).

Please stop being silly and pushing your view/idea on what other people
should be doing (not to mention ignoring real facts).

Thanks,
Bart