Re: Ptrace hole / Linux 2.2.25

Jeff Garzik
2003-03-23T23:23:04Z

Martin J. Bligh wrote:
>>akpm has suggested something like this in the past. I respectfully
>>disagree.
>>
>>The 2.4 kernel will not benefit from constant churn of backporting core
>>kernel changes like a new scheduler. We need to let it settle, simply
>>get it stable, and concentrate on fixing key problems in 2.6. Otherwise
>>you will never have a stable 2.4 tree, and it will look suspiciously more
>>and more like 2.6 as time goes by. Constantly breaking working
>>configurations and changing core behaviors is _not_ the way to go for 2.4.
>>
>>I see 2.4 O(1) scheduler and similar features as _pain_ brought on the
>>vendors by themselves (and their customers).
>
>
> O(1) sched may be a bad example ... how about the fact that mainline VM
> is totally unstable? Witness, for instance, the buffer_head stuff. Fixes
> for that have been around for ages.

"totally unstable" being defined as: My computers don't crash, and my
100%-mainline test kernels pass various Cerberus/LTP/crashme runs.

Of course, I am not totally focused on multi-million-dollar computers,
so maybe my perspective is skewed... ;-)

> The real philosophical question is "what is mainline 2.4 _for_"?

It's the 2.4 tree that's missing all the vendor junk unacceptable for
mainline.

> Yes, the real answer is to get 2.6 out the door, and move people onto it.
> But that will take a little while ... would be nice to get some way to
> alleviate the pain in the meantime.

Fixes should be applied to 2.4-mainline, certainly. Anything else just
wastes developer brain cycles and slows the move to 2.6.

Jeff