Re: [PATCH 3.4 82/88] xen/setup: Populate freed MFNs from non-RAM E820 entries and gaps to E820 RAM

Daniel Kiper
2014-06-10T19:39:27Z

On Tue, Jun 10, 2014 at 11:45:37AM -0700, Greg Kroah-Hartman wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 10, 2014 at 02:18:16PM +0100, David Vrabel wrote:
> > On 10/06/14 10:30, Daniel Kiper wrote:
> > > On Tue, Jun 10, 2014 at 10:07:27AM +0100, David Vrabel wrote:
> > >> On 10/06/14 01:25, Greg Kroah-Hartman wrote:
> > >>> 3.4-stable review patch. If anyone has any objections, please let me know.
> > >>
> > >> This is a new feature and not a bug fix. I don't think it (and patches
> > >> 83-85) are suitable for stable.
> > >
> > > IIRC, this is the main patch fixing dom0 memory looses.
> > > Earlier patches are preparatory stuff and later ones are
> > > fixing bugs introduced by this patch and others. Konrad and I
> > > picked only minimal set of patches to fix that issue in 3.4.
> >
> > This is not a bug fix. dom0 was previously required to use the balloon
> > driver to recover memory freed during setup. This was annoying but not
> > a bug.
> >
> > This patches makes significant changes to how much memory dom0 ends up.
> > Depending on hardware, the dom0_mem option, and the (non)use of the
> > balloon driver applying this could result is between 1 - 3 GB of
> > additional memory allocated to dom0. This could result in there being
> > insufficient host memory available to start a VM.
> >
> > Please do not add to 3.4.y.
>
> Ok, fun stuff, I have two maintainers of the same subsystem arguing over
> if the patches should be sent to the stable tree.
>
> So, what do I do, any ideas? Flip a coin? Ask the third maintainer
> (Boris) to break the tie?
>
> Konrad and Daniel, are distros using this patchset in 3.4 releases?
> What made you want to create them in the first place? Who was
> complaining that warranted this work being done?

I use this kernel version in my private production systems. I thought
that it is worth posting such fixes and make them part of stable.
However, as I can see David (who is maintainer) has some concerns,
Konrad (who is maintainer) was also not so strongly convinced to post
them, Boris (who is maintainer) is not involved and I am not maintainer.
So I think that in this situation you should drop them. Sorry for confusion.

Daniel