Re: [PATCH 4/4] staging: lustre: obdclass: change object lookup to no wait mode

From: Greg Kroah-Hartman
Date: Wed May 16 2018 - 12:25:02 EST


On Tue, May 15, 2018 at 04:02:55PM +0100, James Simmons wrote:
> > > /*
> > > * Allocate new object. This may result in rather complicated
> > > * operations, including fld queries, inode loading, etc.
> > > */
> > > o = lu_object_alloc(env, dev, f, conf);
> > > - if (IS_ERR(o))
> > > + if (unlikely(IS_ERR(o)))
> > > return o;
> > >
> >
> > This is an unrelated and totally pointless. likely/unlikely annotations
> > hurt readability, and they should only be added if it's something which
> > is going to show up in benchmarking. lu_object_alloc() is already too
> > slow for the unlikely() to make a difference and anyway IS_ERR() has an
> > unlikely built in so it's duplicative...
>
> Sounds like a good checkpatch case to test for :-) Some people like to try
> and milk ever cycle they can. Personally for me I never use those
> annotations. With modern processors I'm skeptical if their benefits.
> I do cleanup up the patches to some extent to make it compliant with
> kernel standards but leave the core code in place for people to comment
> on.
>
> > Anyway, I understand that Intel has been ignoring kernel.org instead of
> > sending forwarding their patches properly so you're doing a difficult
> > and thankless job... Thanks for that. I'm sure it's frustrating to
> > look at these patches for you as well.
>
> Thank you for the complement. Also thank you for taking time to review
> these patches. Your feedback is most welcomed and benefitical to the
> health of the lustre client.
>
> Sadly its not just Intel but other vendors that don't directly contribute
> to the linux lustre client. I have spoke to the vendors about contributing
> and they all say the same thing. No working with drivers in the staging
> tree. Sadly all the parties involved are very interested in the success
> of the lustre client. No one has ever told me directly why they don't get
> involved but I suspect it has to deal with 2 reasons. One is that staging
> drivers are not normally enabled by distributions so their clients
> normally will never deal with the staging lustre client. Secondly vendors
> just lack the man power to contribute in a meanful way.

If staging is hurting you, why is it in staging at all? Why not just
drop it, go off and spend a few months to clean up all the issues in
your own tree (with none of those pesky requirements of easy-to-review
patches) and then submit a "clean" filesystem for inclusion in the
"real" part of the kernel tree?

It doesn't sound like anyone is actually using this code in the tree
as-is, so why even keep it here?

thanks,

greg k-h