Hi Dmirty, On Fri, 28 Apr 2017 10:25:29 -0700, Dmitry Torokhov wrote: > On Fri, Apr 28, 2017 at 11:33:21AM +0200, Jean Delvare wrote: > > While this is a laudable goal, how will it scale in practice? I mean, > > most drivers do need quirks in one form or another. Are we really going > > to double the number of "drivers" (as in .c files and modules) and > > Kconfig options to cleanly separate quirks from the device drivers > > proper? > > I do not see minimizing number of drivers as a goal. I also expect that I do. A number of operations are directly dependent of the number of available or loaded drivers. Splitting things into more small pieces only helps performance up to a point, after which it backfires. > devices that get one driver wrong would require more fixups. As far as Not sure what you mean, sorry. "Getting one driver wrong"? > having multiple config options - you do realize that even if we move > these chunks into existing drivers they can still be protected by config > options? Good point, I indeed missed that. But somehow I think I find it less confusing to have the driver-specific quirks option pop up right after I say y or m to the driver in question, than having 2 seemingly independent options in different menus in the configuration tree. Darren just added the missing dependency, which makes things a bit better, but doesn't solve the other "problems". > > (...) > > I'm speechless. If you believe that this kind of bug isn't worth > > fixing quickly > > Would you mind telling me what is s horrible about this bug that > requires it to be fixed immediately. In practical terms please. I guess this is just a case of the straw breaking the camel's back. The non-modularity, then the horrible design, then the DMI check on every I2C device addition on X86 every system, and now casting to the wrong struct (and spending time verifying that it should be just OK in practice, instead of applying a two-liner, obviously safe fix)... That was just too much. Ironically, the only reason why this (otherwise major) bug won't cause any problem in practice is because you use strncmp to compare the names, when strcmp would have been sufficient and preferable. So it's a case of two mistakes compensating each other. > > (...) > > I thought the rule about upstream kernel code acceptance was that > > you should get things right first, no matter how much time and how > > many iterations it takes, and then we commit the result. Apparently > > this has changed while I was not looking :-( > > Yes, that is surely the rule. We do not merge the code until it is > absolutely, 100% bug free. That is why are about to release 4.11 and > stable 4.9 is at 25. I perceive some sarcasm here ;-) But I'm not sure where you are getting at. Of course we release imperfect code, and that's why we have the stable kernel branches. But the idea of these branches is to backport fixes that were found after the branch was released. In this case, I see the 2 fixes have been written on April 3rd and committed on April 13th, which correspond to rc1 and rc2 of the v4.11 release, respectively. It means you had plenty of time to send these fixes to Linus before v4.11 final. You decided not to. This has nothing to do with the stable branches process. I remember from my classes at school about software engineering: "the sooner a problem is detected and fixed, the lower the cost of the fix." It seems that was have a good case for a study here. Just think of the time we all have spent writing and reading these mails (and I deleted half of what I wrote before sending it.) -- Jean Delvare SUSE L3 Support
