To: Felipe Alfaro Solana <lkml@mac.com>
Cc: Con Kolivas <kernel@kolivas.org>, ck@vds.kolivas.org
Bcc: 
Subject: Re: [ck] RFD: kernel embetterment
Reply-To: 
In-Reply-To: <719B25E7-95AB-4B28-A8E2-F54DBBF40D26@mac.com>

On Mon, May 09, 2005 at 03:24:00PM +0200, Felipe Alfaro Solana wrote:
>
>AFAIK, they impose some performance penalty on the kernel itself and  
>I guess high-performance, server-oriented guys won't like this kind  
>of decision. Also, you can't tell them to recompile the kernel in  

Yeah, you're most likely right. But it takes a lot to tear down
a high-end server and a lot of customers have money to buy more.
Also, quite a lot of magic can be done in userspace for performance.

But whatever it would take to cut down losses :)

Some semi-automatic way of reporting bugs would be nice,
but that'd still catch some oopses and such, nothing real and
nothing behavioural.

>order to disable the framepointer support since many of them will run  
>commercial distributions like Red Hat, and this will usually break  
>the support agreements.

Vendors... It's really nice of them to test their kernels, and
backport fixes, but it comes at the cost of things still not
being fixed upstream in -rc and -mm and -rc-mm and gentoo patch set
of the day and, as if that weren't enough, ties the customers down 
from doing any patching of their own.

>I don't think forking is needed at all... look at -ck patchset:  
>there's one for workstations and one for server-class machines. I  
>guess distributions could do the same: distribute a generic kernel  
>for workstations and another one for production servers.

That's one of my issues. -ckserver is not that different, from
what I seem to remember, disabling some features and not using
some defaults, turns -ck into -ckserver.

If the vendors ship out kernels with different target groups,
what's up with not making that the mainline behavior, if it's
deemed necessary.

But I think we've seen that Linux can scale, maybe it'd be
more important to keep it that way.
Then again, does anyone know how many embedded vendors use
vanilla out of the box, or do they patch it some and never
release any changes because no one really bothered to ask?

Besides, the word on the streets is that 2.6.12 will fail,
because we're at -rc3 or -rc4 or -rc4-mm6-bk1024 or whatever
and people report filesystems spontaneously combusting all
over the board. There are also rumors of kswapd bugging.

I'm sure there's no list anywhere of these ;)

We just got smp-balanced nice, which I sort of assumed
was there; we just got it after eight revisions of the
eleventh kernel for god's sake, because it accidentally
worked in 2.4 and no one bothered to think twice about
this.

And it's still not even official, seems I'm the only
guy so far who reported it worked, and one other guy
reported it didn't work, and con wrote it and tested it
and said it worked.
One for, one against and one who could be judged biased.

This should never never ever be even remotely possible to happen.
None of this.
Sorry.

PS.
No, I didn't post while I was angry, I just started feeling a bit
poignant while writing, and I'm still sticking to Linux :)

-- 
mjt