Re: [PATCH AUTOSEL for 4.14 015/161] printk: Add console owner and waiter logic to load balance console writes

Sasha Levin
2018-05-03T13:06:57Z

On Thu, May 03, 2018 at 11:47:24AM +0200, Pavel Machek wrote:
>On Mon 2018-04-16 21:18:47, Sasha Levin wrote:
>> On Mon, Apr 16, 2018 at 10:43:28PM +0200, Jiri Kosina wrote:
>> >On Mon, 16 Apr 2018, Sasha Levin wrote:
>> >
>> >> So I think that Linus's claim that users come first applies here as
>> >> well. If there's a user that cares about a particular feature being
>> >> broken, then we go ahead and fix his bug rather then ignoring him.
>> >
>> >So one extreme is fixing -stable *iff* users actually do report an issue.
>> >
>> >The other extreme is backporting everything that potentially looks like a
>> >potential fix of "something" (according to some arbitrary metric),
>> >pro-actively.
>> >
>> >The former voilates the "users first" rule, the latter has a very, very
>> >high risk of regressions.
>> >
>> >So this whole debate is about finding a compromise.
>> >
>> >My gut feeling always was that the statement in
>> >
>> > Documentation/process/stable-kernel-rules.rst
>> >
>> >is very reasonable, but making the process way more "aggresive" when
>> >backporting patches is breaking much of its original spirit for me.
>>
>> I agree that as an enterprise distro taking everything from -stable
>> isn't the best idea. Ideally you'd want to be close to the first
>
>Original purpose of -stable was "to be common base of enterprise
>distros" and our documentation still says it is.

I guess that the world changes?

At this point calling enterprise distros a niche wouldn't be too far
from the truth. Furthermore, some enterprise distros (as stated
earlier in this thread) don't even follow -stable anymore and cherry
pick their own commits.

So no, the main driving force behind -stable is not traditional
enterprise distributions.

>> I think that we can agree that it's impossible to expect every single
>> Linux user to go on LKML and complain about a bug he encountered, so the
>> rule quickly becomes "It must fix a real bug that can bother
>> people".
>
>I think you are playing dangerous word games.
>
>> My "aggressiveness" comes from the whole "bother" part: it doesn't have
>> to be critical, it doesn't have to cause data corruption, it doesn't
>> have to be a security issue. It's enough that the bug actually affects a
>> user in a way he didn't expect it to (if a user doesn't have
>> expectations, it would fall under the "This could be a problem..."
>> exception.
>
>And it seems documentation says you should be less aggressive and
>world tells you they expect to be less aggressive. So maybe that's
>what you should do?

Who is this "world" you're referring to?