Re: Ping? RE: [GIT PULL] mm/vfs/fs:cleancache for 2.6.37 mergewindow

From: Andrew Morton
Date: Sat Oct 30 2010 - 15:07:47 EST


On Wed, 27 Oct 2010 11:37:47 -0700 (PDT) Dan Magenheimer <dan.magenheimer@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> Ping? I hope you are still considering this. If not or if
> there are any questions I can answer, please let me know.

What's happened here is that the patchset has gone through its
iterations and a few people have commented and then after a while,
nobody had anything to say about the code so nobody said anything more.

But silence doesn't mean acceptance - it just means that nobody had
anything to say.

I think I looked at the earlier iterations, tried to understand the
point behind it all, made a few code suggestions and eventually tuned
out. At that time (and hence at this time) I just cannot explain to
myself why we would want to merge this code.

All new code is a cost/benefit decision. The costs are pretty well
known: larger codebase, more code for us and our "customers" to
maintain and support, etc. That the code pokes around in vfs and
various filesystems does increase those costs a little.

But the extent of the benefits to our users aren't obvious to me. The
code is still xen-specific, I believe? If so, that immediately reduces
the benefit side by a large amount simply because of the reduced
audience.

We did spend some time trying to get this wired up to zram so that the
feature would be potentially useful to *all* users, thereby setting the
usefulness multiplier back to 1.0. But I don't recall that anything
came of this?

I also don't know how useful the code is to its intended
micro-audience: xen users!


So can we please revisit all this from the top level? Jeremy, your
input would be valuable. Christoph, I recall that you had technical
objections - can you please repeat those?


It's the best I can do to kick this along, sorry.
--
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/