Re: Document hadling of bad memory

Rob Landley
2008-12-09T21:40:57Z

On Tuesday 09 December 2008 06:31:52 Pavel Machek wrote:
> I cleaned the document up according to Randy (thanks!). I don't actually
> know enough about DRAM error characcteristics, I guess'round the size of
> bad region up to nearest 2^n makes sense.
>
> Signed-off-by: Pavel Machek <pavel@suse.cz>
>
> diff --git a/Documentation/bad_memory.txt b/Documentation/bad_memory.txt
...
> +This Howto is about number 3).
>
>
> BadRAM
> ######
> -BadRAM is the actively developed and available as kernel-patch
> +BadRAM is the actively developed and available as a kernel patch
> here: http://rick.vanrein.org/linux/badram/

Ok, once again: the point of this patch is to document an out of tree patch.

The out of tree patch is here:
http://rick.vanrein.org/linux/badram/software/BadRAM-2.6.27.1.patch

It has its own Documentation/badram.txt file and it patches
Documentation/memory.txt, as acknowledged here:

> For more details see the BadRAM documentation.
> @@ -27,19 +27,20 @@ For more details see the BadRAM documentation.
> memmap
> ######

Now what I don't understand is, why add something to the tree formalizing the
out-of-tree status of this other patch? Why not just merge it? If it's
interesting enough to have documentation about the patch in the tree, why is
the patch itself not interesting enough to merge? It's clearly got an active
maintainer, and has for years. (Is there something specific about it that
needs to be cleaned up?)

Adding this extra documentation to the badram patch sounds great. Merging the
badram patch into the linux kernel sounds useful; obviously _this_ patch is
inherently an expression of interest in it. Adding documentation about the
badram patch to the linux kernel tree but _not_ adding the badram patch itself
seems kind of crazy.

Would someone please explain the reasoning here? I don't understand it.

Rob