Re: [PATCH 00/14] convert voyager over to the x86 quirks model

[James Bottomley]

On Tue, 2009-04-14 at 20:08 +0200, Ingo Molnar wrote: 
> * Ingo Molnar <mingo@xxxxxxx> wrote:
> 
> > 
> > * James Bottomley <James.Bottomley@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > 
> > >  39 files changed, 554 insertions(+), 726 deletions(-)
> > 
> > That diffstat is not against current mainline, is it? 
> > Would you mind to send a proper diffstat with the revert 
> > included as well? That will give us a complete picture.
> 
> ok, i did the calculations, and the effect of adding back 
> x86/Voyager is roughly:
> 
>    48 files changed, 5226 insertions(+), 142 deletions(-)
> 
> That's quite a lot, and lets put this into perspective.

Hardly ... you're conflating two issues:  one is what is the burden to
mainline, which the patch series is about, although only patch 1 (and
possibly patch 5) is truly critical to that, the rest are assorted code
moves.



> You are talking about moving ~5000 lines of legacy code back into 
> arch/x86/, for a total of *four* Voyager/Linux systems, which are 
> using _ancient_ 486/P5 era CPUs.

That's factually incorrect on both counts.  But the real point is that
kernel development isn't a popularity contest, it's about the technical
merits of the code ... something you've been conspicuously avoiding.

> Two of these systems are in your house, two are somewhere unknown: 
> their owners certainly never sent bugreports against recent mainline 
> kernels (Voyager didnt even _build_ for a couple of straight kernel 
> releases), and i suspect those boxes are probably decommissioned 
> already.
> 
> A single core on my run-of-the-mill x86 laptop has more computing 
> power than all Voyager/Linux systems on the planet, combined. And 
> you now want to add back support to the mainline arch/x86 code, 
> which we are trying hard to keep running on millions of x86 Linux 
> systems?

Well, what can I say, if your laptop is the speed standard for
acceptable architectures, then I suppose you'll be removing all of the
embedded architectures as well?

In spite of your disdain for older processors, just remember that the
highest x86 processor with a military spec rating is the 486DX, and one
of the things the US department of defence likes about us is that we
still support it.

Actually, there are a lot of quiet projects using linux because we're
happy to support them on older hardware ... it's one of the things that
makes Linux different from, say, windows.

> You still have not given proper justification for doing that ...

The justification is that I'm prepared to maintain it.

> Sorry to be the one to say 'no', but the reasons you gave so far 
> were not very convincing to me.
>  
> Anyway, you seem to be willing to maintain this code it out of tree. 
> If someone owns such an ancient Voyager box and wants to test a new 
> kernel then your tree is a good starting point for doing that. 
> There's really no pressing need to have this in mainline.

So the message you want to be giving out as a maintainer is that
everything should be developed upstream, except when it's x86?

James


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