Re: [PATCH 00/16] DEPT(Dependency Tracker)

Matthew Wilcox
2022-02-17T17:06:44Z

On Thu, Feb 17, 2022 at 12:00:05PM -0500, Steven Rostedt wrote:
> On Thu, 17 Feb 2022 10:51:09 -0500
> "Theodore Ts'o" <tytso@mit.edu> wrote:
>
> > I know that you're trying to help us, but this tool needs to be far
> > better than Lockdep before we should think about merging it. Even if
> > it finds 5% more potential deadlocks, if it creates 95% more false
> > positive reports --- and the ones it finds are crazy things that
> > rarely actually happen in practice, are the costs worth the benefits?
> > And who is bearing the costs, and who is receiving the benefits?
>
> I personally believe that there's potential that this can be helpful and we
> will want to merge it.
>
> But, what I believe Ted is trying to say is, if you do not know if the
> report is a bug or not, please do not ask the maintainers to determine it
> for you. This is a good opportunity for you to look to see why your tool
> reported an issue, and learn that subsystem. Look at if this is really a
> bug or not, and investigate why.

I agree with Steven here, to the point where I'm willing to invest some
time being a beta-tester for this, so if you focus your efforts on
filesystem/mm kinds of problems, I can continue looking at them and
tell you what's helpful and what's unhelpful in the reports.