Re: [GIT PULL] Performance Counters for Linux

Kyle McMartin
2009-06-12T04:08:13Z

[With my Fedora on.]

On Thu, Jun 11, 2009 at 10:06:55AM -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote:
>
>
> On Thu, 11 Jun 2009, Christoph Hellwig wrote:
> >
> > So what point is there in keeping it in-tree except making life hell for
> > packagers?
>
> Give it up. Packagers can trivially generate their own sub-packages. They
> do it all the time. They already do it for the user-mode header files,
> extracted from the kernel - something you've worked on yourself.
>
> So your point is clearly bogus, and dishonest.
>
> You haven't actually looked the real problem in the eye, and acknowledged
> the disaster that is oprofile. Let's give a _new_ approach a chance, and
> see if we can avoid the mistakes of yesteryear this time.
>

This is actually somewhat complicated for (at least, I can only speak
from experience for...) Fedora and Debian/Ubuntu. Having this in-kernel
means any bugfixes needed for the 'perf' tool, require patching the
kernel source, which will result in a whole new kernel rpm being built.
So in order to update their 'perf' tool, users will get a new kernel,
debuginfo, etc., with it.

So either we need to split it out into its own source tarball, or ship
the kernel source again in a seperate source package. I know which I'm
going to tend to favour...

Obviously, I understand the reasons for doing this, but I don't really
see it as a sensible long term option for a mature tool. But,
whatever, it's not my call. We'll just work around whatever happens.

regards, Kyle