Re: Attempted summary of "RT patch acceptance" thread

From: Eugeny S. Mints
Date: Tue Jun 14 2005 - 01:51:27 EST


Karim Yaghmour wrote:
Daniel Walker wrote:

I wouldn't work on RT if mainline integration wasn't on the agenda.


Mainline integration IS what I'm talking about. It's just not done
the same way.


There is going to be positive , and negative discussion on this. I think
in the end the maintainers (Linus, and Andrew) don't want "people" to
get a patch or modification from the outside. It's best if the community
is not separated .. If you make a clean integration , and people want
what you are doing, there is no reason for it to be rejected.


I'm not suggesting the separation of the community, I'm suggesting
a strategy of integration based on the fact that a large portion of
kernel contributors don't necessarily care about RT, and most don't
want to care about it in their day-to-day work
I would suggest that "don't want to care about it" already led and could lead to more bugs similar to the bugs discovered due to RT enchancements. But the bottom line here is that these bugs are almost always bugs in SMP kernel as well about which each kernel developer have to worry about.
(though I think most
would care that Linux could have an additional spade down its
sleeve, and would certainly try to help in as much they can from
time to time.)

I'm not suggesting asking "people" to get patches from the outside.
What I'm saying is that those developing mainstream code shouldn't
need to worry about anything real-time, including modifications to
locking primitives in headers (be they defined out or in).

In essence, what you ask can only hold if all kernel developers
intend for Linux to become QNX. Clearly this isn't going to happen.
Whatever changes are made to such core functionality as locking
primitives and interrupt handling can hardly be "transparent"
simply by wrapping #ifdef CONFIG_X around it in mainstream headers.
Do you hardly working on the kernel patched with RT patch in other configurations than PREEMPT_RT? But I'm working and can;t report any outstanding issues/degradation. These changes _are_ "transperent" due to preemtp modes configurability. So what do you have behind "can hardly be "transparent" simply by wrapping #ifdef CONFIG_X around it"?

From my point of view, determinism and best overall performance are
conflicting goals. Having separate derectories for something as
fundamentally different from best overall performance as determinism
is not too much to ask.
configurability of the kernel gives you possibily to choose what you want in your custom case. Source code organization is a matter of whatever else (readability, complexity, separation of completely different functionality (but this is not this case), desire for community acceptance, etc) but not that determinism and best overall performance are conflicting goals. Why don;t you object against SMP though it definitly could conflict with goals of desktop kernel configurations?

Eugeny
Karim


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