On 03.04.24 18:10, Greg KH wrote:
On Wed, Apr 03, 2024 at 05:22:17AM -1000, Tejun Heo wrote:
On Wed, Apr 03, 2024 at 07:11:04AM +0200, Greg KH wrote:
Side note: I have no idea why the stable team backported those patches and no option on whether that was wise, just trying to help finding the best solution forward from the current state of things.
The Fixes: tag triggered it, that's why they were backported.
Yeah, this is what I assumed.
which would be far too invasive for -stable, thus no Cc: stable.
I didn't know a Fixes tag automatically triggers backport to -stable. I will keep that in mind for future.
/me fears that more and more developers due to situations like this will avoid Fixes: tags and wonders what consequences that might have for the kernel as a whole
The problem is that we have subsystems that only use Fixes: and not cc: stable which is why we need to pick these up as well. Fixes: is great, but if everyone were to do this "properly" then we wouldn't need to pick these other ones up, but instead, it's about 1/3 of our volume :(
I'm also well aware of that and do not want to complain about it, as I think I grasped why the stable team works like that -- and even think given the circumstances it is round about the right approach. I also understand that mistakes will always happen.
Nevertheless this thread and the Bluetooth thing we had earlier this week[1] makes me fear that this approach could lead to developer avoiding Fixes: tags. And funny thing, that's something that is already happening, as I noticed by chance today: "'"A "Fixes" tag has been deliberately omitted to avoid potential test failures and subsequent regression issues that could arise from backporting."'"[2].
I wonder if that in the long term might be bad. But well, maybe it won't matter much. Still made me wonder if we should have a different solution for this kind of problem. Something like this?
Cc: stable@vger.kernel.org # DoNotBackport
Or something like this?
Cc: stable@vger.kernel.org # DoNotBackport - or only after 16 weeks in mainline [but I don't care]
Whatever, mainly thinking aloud and do no need a reply to this. :-D
[1] https://lore.kernel.org/all/84da1f26-0457-451c-b4fd-128cb9bd860d@leemhuis.in...
[2] saw that today here: https://lore.kernel.org/all/cover.1712226175.git.antony.antony@secunet.com/
I'll gladly revert the above series if they shouldn't have been backported to stable, but from reading them, it seemed like they were fixing an issue that was serious and should have been added to stable, which is why they were.
Oh, yeah, they're fixing an issue. It's just that the issue is relatively confined peformance degradation and the fix is really invasive, so not a great -stable candidate. At the very least, they'd need a log longer cooking time in mainline before being considered for -stable backport.
Ok, I'll go revert them all now. I did some test builds here with them reverted and they seem sane. I'll push out some -rcs with just the reverts to at least fix the regressions found in the 6.8.y tree now.
Great, thx for taking care of this!
Ciao, Thorsten