Re: RSDL v0.31

From: Linus Torvalds
Date: Tue Mar 20 2007 - 11:33:13 EST




On Tue, 20 Mar 2007, Willy Tarreau wrote:
>
> Linus, you're unfair with Con. He initially was on this position, and lately
> worked with Mike by proposing changes to try to improve his X responsiveness.

I was not actually so much speaking about Con, as about a lot of the
tone in general here. And yes, it's not been entirely black and white. I
was very happy to see the "try this patch" email from Al Boldi - not
because I think that patch per se was necessarily the right fix (I have no
idea), but simply because I think that's the kind of mindset we need to
have.

Not a lot of people really *like* the old scheduler, but it's been tweaked
over the years to try to avoid some nasty behaviour. I'm really hoping
that RSDL would be a lot better (and by all accounts it has the potential
for that), but I think it's totally naïve to expect that it won't need
some tweaking too.

So I'll happily still merge RSDL right after 2.6.21 (and it won't even be
a config option - if we want to make it good, we need to make sure
*everybody* tests it), but what I want to see is that "can do" spirit wrt
tweaking for issues that come up.

Because let's face it - nothing is ever perfect. Even a really nice
conceptual idea always ends up hitting the "but in real life, things are
ugly and complex, and we've depended on behaviour X in the past and can't
change it, so we need some tweaking for problem Y".

And everything is totally fixable - at least as long as people are willing
to!

Linus