Re: kdbus: to merge or not to merge?

Martin Steigerwald
2015-06-25T06:01:43Z

Am Mittwoch, 24. Juni 2015, 19:20:27 schrieb Linus Torvalds:
> On Wed, Jun 24, 2015 at 7:14 PM, Steven Rostedt <rostedt@goodmis.org>
wrote:
> > I don't think it will complicate things even if the API changes. The
> > distros will have to deal with that fall out. Mainline only cares about
> > its own regressions. But any API changes would only be done for good
> > reasons, and give the distros an excuse to fix whatever was done wrong
> > in the first place.
> I don't think that's true.
>
> Realistically, every single kernel developer tends to work on a
> machine with some random distro. If that developer cannot compile his
> own kernel because his distro stops working, or has to use some
> "kdbus=0" switch to turn off the kernel kdbus and (hopefuly) the
> distro just switches to the legacy user mode bus, then for that
> developer, merging and enabling incompatible kdbus implementation is
> basically a regression.
>
> We've seen this before. We end up stuck with the ABI of whatever user
> land applications. It doesn't matter where that ABI came from.
>
> I do agree that distro's that want to enable kdbus before any agreed
> version has been merged would get to also act as guinea pigs and do
> their own QA, and handle fallout from whatever problems they encounter
> etc. That part might be good. But I don't think we really end up
> having the option to make up some incompatible kdbus ABI
> after-the-fact.

Linus, so is that a recommendation to the distros to be careful to put kdbus
into the distro kernel right now and probably better defer it or are you
thinking that the ABI of kdbus already is suitable for merging and you see
no issues to merge a kdbus with the ABI it currently has, but probably
otherwise improved?

Thanks,
--
Martin 'Helios' Steigerwald - http://www.Lichtvoll.de
GPG: 03B0 0D6C 0040 0710 4AFA B82F 991B EAAC A599 84C7