Re: Polling (was Re: [PATCHSET 2/2] implement PMP support, take 6)

[Jeff Garzik <jeff@garzik.org>]

(my last response only addressed -mm)

Mark Lord wrote:
> I believe the point was that getting things into libata is glacial

IMHO would say that there are two causes of that:
1) I am sometimes slow in merging, part of which is my own fault, and I 
can only promise to try and do better there.  Part of which is a result 
of stuff being dependent on -mm (which requires plenty of time 
hand-merging) rather than libata-dev.git#upstream.

2) I have been intentionally staging major libata behavior changes 
between Linux releases.  Luckily most of these are behind us, but, in 
several cases with things like ACPI on/off (hopefully 'on' in 2.6.24), 
probing changes (switchover to new EH for probing via hotplug, etc.), 
interrupt handling changes.

I dislike getting "too much" into a single release, because of the 
difficulty of getting large scale feedback without a major kernel release.

So far I think the kernel releases have been pretty darn successful in 
"not breaking everybody" but that clearly conflicts with desired 
development speed, given the glacial pace of each kernel release.  If 
each kernel release were 1-2 months apart, we would have many more 
testing points, and I think you guys and I would both be happy.  But 
that's not the reality today, with 3+ month kernel release cycles (ugh!!).

I'm very much interested in hearing suggestions and comments.

	Jeff