Re: A modest proposal -- We need a patch penguin

Linus Torvalds
2002-01-30T00:40:53Z

On Tue, 29 Jan 2002, Rik van Riel wrote:
>
> That's fine with me, but _who_ do I send VM patches to if
> I can't send them to you ?

The VM stuff right now seems to be Andrea, Dave or you yourself (right now
I just wish you would split up your patches like Andrea does, that way I
can cherry-pick).

> There is no maintainer for mm/* or kernel/*, it's just you.

As to kernel/ there are actually maintainers for some sub-areas, the most
noticeable being Ingo on the scheduler. The rest of kernel/ hasn't ever
been much of a problem, really.

The VM is a big issue, of course. And that one isn't likely to go away
anytime soon as a point of contention. And it's not easy to modularize,
apart from the obvious pieces (ie "filemap.c" vs the rest).

You may not believe me when I say so, but I personally _really_ hope your
rmap patches will work out. I may not have believed in your patches in a
2.4.x kind of timeframe, but for 2.6.x I'm more optimistic. As to how to
actually modularize it better to make points of contention smaller, I
don't know how.

At the same time, while I can understand your personal pain, I don't think
most of the problems have been with the VM (maintenance-wise, that is.
Most of the _technical_ problems really have been with the VM, it's just
the most complex piece).

Linus