Re: [PATCHSET] Announce: High-res timers, tickless/dyntick and dynamic HZ

Roman Zippel
2006-06-19T13:48:11Z

Hi,

On Mon, 19 Jun 2006, Ingo Molnar wrote:

> > > Bugreports and suggestions are welcome,
> >
> > Could you please document the patches? I know it sucks compared to
> > hacking, but it would make a review a lot simpler.
>
> yeah, we'll add some description to the patches themselves, but

The problem is this is not the first time I mentioned this and some
patches still have no descriptions at all! :-(

> otherwise i'm afraid it will be like with almost all patch submissions
> on lkml: 99% of the details are in the code and people have to ask
> specifically if one area or another is unclear :-|

For a lot of things this acceptable, but if patches (e.g. clockevents) add
new generic infrastructure which effect all archs, they need
documentation (unless you also provide all the arch specific changes).

> Meanwhile the patch names should provide you with some initial info
> (also, we reuse GTOD which is documented in -mm) and the splitup is
> pretty clean too - but in any case please feel free to ask pointed
> questions! (we happily accept documentation patches as well.)

I can't do this without documentation. Without any information I'm only
wondering why it has to be this complex.
For example clockevents, I think all the special event handlers are
overkill, a simple list would do just fine. This way it may also possible
to treat a clock as virtual interrupt source and we could share code with
interrupt code and a callback can simply be requested via request_irq().
More information about what this code actually intends to do and what it
is required to do, would help a great deal to judge alternative solutions,
but only the author of this code can really provide this information and
IMO it's really sad that this information is still lacking after being
requested multiple times.

bye, Roman