Re: Attempted summary of "RT patch acceptance" thread

From: Ingo Molnar
Date: Sat Jun 11 2005 - 00:35:24 EST



* Andrea Arcangeli <andrea@xxxxxxx> wrote:

> On Fri, Jun 10, 2005 at 03:37:24PM -0700, Bill Huey wrote:
> > Some of the comments from various folks are just intolerably paranoid
>
> Just tell me how can you go to a customer and tell him that your
> linux-RTOS has a guaranteed worst case latency of 50usec. [...]

Andrea, please just stop these scare tactics, it's getting boring. First
you came with incorrect statements about locks, then you came with the
patent boogeyman, then you came with the driver bogosity, and now you
come with "but ... [sputter] ... but ... where's the _guarantee_?".

Andrea, _please_ lean back and read back some of your earlier arguments.
To make it easier for you and to refresh your recollection, let me give
you a selection, just so that you can see why your sentiment creates
flames and personal responses:

'[...] how can preempt-RT ever become hard-RT when a simple lock hangs
it.' (Andrea Arcangeli, May 31, 2005)

'Exactly, they're simply not remotely comparable, a VM improvement may
break preempt-RT anytime, it's just too easy to screw things up and
invalidate all "measurements".' (Andrea Arcangeli, Jun 1, 2005)

'Indeed, that's why I believe hard-RT with preempt-RT is just a
joke.' (Andrea Arcangeli, May 31, 2005)

'Then I'm afraid preempt-RT infringe on the patent that they take
after years of doing that in linux. I'm not a lawyer but you may want
to check before investing too much on this for the next 15 years.'
(Andrea Arcangeli, Jun 1, 2005)

'Why do you take risks when you can go with much more relaible
solutions like RTAI and rtlinux?' (Andrea Arcangeli, Jun 11, 2005)

I have to say, based on these statements you could soon become a fine
replacement for Blake Stowell or the Iraqi Information Minister :-)

just to make it plain and obvious: there are two things that are true
about the above snippets: 1) as far as they were technical comments they
are all dead wrong, and 2) you never apologized for them. Wouldnt you
yourself become a bit ... touchy if this happened to you on such a
widespread basis? Please give me an answer, how much unjust accusations
do i have to take before i have the _right_ to flame you, hm? :-)

thinking about the root causes of your behavior, it seems to me that you
have a real inner trouble admitting mistakes (and that's not only true
for this incident) - even though mistakes are human and i do at least a
dozen mistakes every day and sometimes i screw up really bad. Like 3
months ago when i criticised SECCOMP [your project] in an uninformed and
thus unjust way. Perhaps we are getting this from you because you are
still hurting from that SECCOMP incident? If it's about SECCOMP then i'd
like to apologize again: i was wrong about SECCOMP and it's a fine and
promising project. Okay?

if you review the PREEMPT_RT technology (with a cool mind) i do think
you'll eventually come to the conclusion that it is actually a pretty
nifty idea and implementation, with some pretty good potential :-) It's
not trying to be the holy grail, it wont (nor does it want to) replace
nanokernels, but it actually has some thinking behind it and is
definitely useful to alot of people. And that is what matters. Your
feelings about it or me dont really count.

Ingo
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