Re: [RFC, PATCH 0/102]: xfs: 3.0.x stable kernel update

Ben Myers
2012-09-04T21:13:02Z

On Mon, Sep 03, 2012 at 04:04:06PM +1000, Dave Chinner wrote:
> On Sat, Sep 01, 2012 at 07:10:19PM -0400, Christoph Hellwig wrote:
> > I've done a brief look over the patches this week and while I can't spot
> > anything wrong I'm defintively a bit concerned about the amount of churn
> > for a long term stable series. A lot of this does not seem to fit the
> > strict -stable criteria, and given that I've not really seen any major
> > issues with the current 3.0-stable codebase I'm wondering what the
> > guranteed gain vs the status quo is.
>
> You didn't troll the RH bugzilla ;)

Hehe. ;)

> The XFS code base in RHEL6 is sitting at 3.0, and several of the
> problems that have workarounds in 3.0.x don't fix the problems
> reported (e.g. the log space hangs), while the fixes in the more
> recent mainline kernel do.
>
> I simply figured that I've got to do this much work to fix all the
> bugs reported in RHEL6 and given the code bases are almost identical
> I'd do a community service and push it to 3.0.x first. I'm quite
> happy not to push it to 3.0.x if the consensus is that it is too
> much churn.

FWIW I think it's great that you've done the community this service.
I'm just now (finally) getting this patchset onto a machine for some
testing.

Ok.. now that I've refreshed my memory of
Documentation/stable_kernel_rules.txt, I can see Christoph's point.
Some of these patches are hard to justify based upon those rules. For
example:

Patch 2, 'remove dead ENODEV handling in xfs_destroy_ioend' seems to
just remove some dead code. However, if it were clear that it fixes
some kind of problem by removing the dead code it could easily be
justified.

Patch 94, 'm_maxioffset is redundant' seems like a cleanup. But maybe
it is required so that a subsequent patch will apply properly?

Patch 95, 'make largest supported offset less shouty' just cleans up a
macro. Again... maybe there is a good reason to pull that in besides
the shouting.

So there are three examples that would probably require some kind of
justification to apply within the rules as stated. Maybe -stable just
needs a link to the bug each one of them resolves.

It looks like there are plenty in the patchset that are very clearly
appropriate within the rules, no additional justification required. We
certainly don't want to lose that. We can go through the set and reply
to those which seem questionable...

-Ben