Re: [git pull] drm fixes

Linus Torvalds
2011-12-06T16:44:49Z

On Tue, Dec 6, 2011 at 8:36 AM, Dave Airlie <airlied@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Well I do care about kexec but only due to being forced into caring
> about it for a certain enterprise distro that uses it a lot, so maybe
> I was a bit biased in this case, and I dislike random memory
> corruptions due to my subsystem even in the kexec case. Writing a
> random 0 dword somewhere in memory isn't that pretty and no fun to
> track down, when the kexec looks like it succeeds.

So having looked at the patch itself, I don't dislike the notion of
making sure certain fields are nicely initialized. So I don't hate the
patch itself, but quite frankly, to me it doesn't smell even
*remotely* like "regression fix". I don't think this is something that
has ever worked.

And I do realize that some enterprise distros want to use kexec, but
at the same time I say "that's *their* problem". We know kexec hasn't
been horribly reliable, anybody who uses it should have be taking that
into account.

I hope kexec gets more reliable, but I *also* really hope that our RC
series will calm down, and on the whole, weighing the two concerns,
when we're talking about something that has never worked before
either, I think the thing is pretty clear.

That said, if there is some other real use-case ("this fixes problems
with the BIOS from Xyz initializing things to random crap"), I'd have
no real objections to the patch itself.

So my complaint is really a "I want to be more anal about the later
-rc patches, I feel we're slipping", not a "I hate the patch per se".

Linus