Re: [PATCH 1/4] Support generic I/O requests

[Nitin Gupta <ngupta@vflare.org>]

Hi Pekka,

On 06/05/2010 02:05 PM, Pekka Enberg wrote:
> 
> On Fri, Jun 4, 2010 at 10:19 PM, Andrew Morton
> <akpm@linux-foundation.org> wrote:
>>> I thought zram is related to memory management a little bit.
>>>
>>> What's the criteria?
>>
>> Yes, and this is something which bothers me a bit about the -staging
>> process.  Code gets in there largely under the radar of the people who
>> work in that area.  It gets "matured" for a while and the developer
>> thinks it's all ready to go into "mainline" and ....  then what?
>> Someone needs to yank the code out of -staging and tell the interested
>> parties "hey, look at this".  And at this stage, they might say "hell
>> no", or request large changes and the developer who thought everything
>> was all ready to go would be justifiably upset.
>>
>> Obviously, this hasn't happened (much) with zram (partly because I
>> happened to notice it), but the potential is there.
>>
>> I'm not sure what a good solution is, really.  Obviously it would be
>> better if such code went straight into the subsystem maintainer's tree
>> on day one and got worked on there.  But if that process was working
>> efficiently, we wouldn't have ever needed ./staging/.
> 
> I thought the idea here is that when zram is "good enough", Nitin or
> Greg would post squashed patches of it for review and if maintainers
> are ready to take it, we'd merge the full history from -staging.
> 
> Not sure what Nitin's or Greg's plans are but I think it might be
> realistic to try to get zram properly merged for 2.6.36.
> 

Yes, I'm planning to move it to drivers proper in 2.6.36.

>> So I suppose we (ie: Greg ;)) should identify the destination
>> maintainer at the outset and make sure that the maintainer(s) and the
>> subsystem mailing list are kept in the loop on all developments, and
>> that they're aware that this code is headed their way.  Perhaps that's
>> already happening and I missed it.
> 
> Ramzswap and zram have been discussed on LKML. I guess Nitin should
> have CC'd linux-mm as well for you to see it? There hasn't been huge
> interest in reviewing the code which is why I suggested -staging in
> the first place. It ought to be a place where we can do in-tree
> development while we wait for the busy maintainers to have the chance
> to look at the code, no?
> 

Its all somewhat related to "compressed caching", so maybe linux-mm
should be added. I will do so for future patches which makes non-trivial
changes.

Thanks for your reviews and ACKs.

Nitin