Re: Xen is a feature

Linus Torvalds
2009-06-02T18:09:20Z

On Tue, 2 Jun 2009, Linus Torvalds wrote:
>
> I dunno. I just do know that I pointed out the statistics for how
> mindlessly incestuous the Xen patches have historically been to Jeremy. He
> admitted it. I've not seen _anybody_ say that things will improve.

In case people want to look at this on their own, get a git tree, and run
the examples I asked Jeremy to run:

git log --pretty=oneline --full-diff --stat arch/x86/kvm/ |
grep -v '/kvm' |
less -S

and then go ahead and do the same except with "xen" instead of "kvm".

Now, once you've done that, ask yourself which one is going to be merged
easily and without any pushback.

Btw, this is NOT meant to be a "xen vs kvm" thing. Before you react to the
"kvm" part, replace "arch/x86/kvm" above with "drivers/scsi" or something.

The point? Xen really is horribly badly separated out. It gets way more
incestuous with other systems than it should. It's entirely possible that
this is very fundamental to both paravirtualization and to hypervisor
behavior, but it doesn't matter - it just measn that I can well see that
Xen is a f*cking pain to merge.

So please, Xen people, look at your track record, and look at the issues
from the standpoint of somebody merging your code, rather than just from
the standpoint of somebody who whines "I want my code to be merged".

IOW, if you have trouble getting your code merged, ask yourself what _you_
are doing wrong.

Linus