On Thu, May 24, 2018 at 4:28 AM Greg KH gregkh@linuxfoundation.org wrote:
On Thu, May 24, 2018 at 04:17:12AM -0700, Hugh Dickins wrote:
Thu, May 24, 2018 at 4:06 AM Greg Kroah-Hartman gregkh@linuxfoundation.org wrote:
On Thu, May 24, 2018 at 12:50:11PM +0200, Jan Kara wrote:
On Thu 24-05-18 11:38:27, Greg Kroah-Hartman wrote:
4.4-stable review patch. If anyone has any objections, please
let me
know.
Just one objection: Why does stable care about this (and the
previous
patch)? I've checked the stable queue and I don't see anything that
would
have these patches as a prerequisite. And on their own, they are
only
cleanups without substantial gains.
There's a small gain here:
paralleldd 4.4.0 4.4.0 vanilla avoidlock Amean Elapsd-1 5.28 ( 0.00%) 5.15 ( 2.50%) Amean Elapsd-4 5.29 ( 0.00%) 5.17 ( 2.12%) Amean Elapsd-7 5.28 ( 0.00%) 5.18 ( 1.78%) Amean Elapsd-12 5.20 ( 0.00%) 5.33 ( -2.50%) Amean Elapsd-21 5.14 ( 0.00%) 5.21 ( -1.41%) Amean Elapsd-30 5.30 ( 0.00%) 5.12 ( 3.38%) Amean Elapsd-48 5.78 ( 0.00%) 5.42 ( 6.21%) Amean Elapsd-79 6.78 ( 0.00%) 6.62 ( 2.46%) Amean Elapsd-110 9.09 ( 0.00%) 8.99 ( 1.15%) Amean Elapsd-128 10.60 ( 0.00%) 10.43 ( 1.66%)
The impact is small but intuitively, it makes sense to avoid
unnecessary
calls to lock_page.
Yes, it's small, but it's marked in the SLES kernel as "needs to be merged into stable", so obviously it matters to someone :)
Hmm. I had the same reaction to these two as Jan, but assumed that they made applying later patches easier, and didn't take the trouble he did
to
find that's not so.
I've no wish to be disputatious, but it does seem that the definition of "stable" has changed, and not necessarily for the better, if it's now a home for small gains: I thought we left those to upstream.
This is in the SLES kernel for a reason, and again, it's in the section that says "this should be pushed to stable". So if it's good enough for the SLES kernel, why isn't it good enough for all users of this kernel tree?
If you all think it should be dropped in both places, that's fine with me :)
I think they are perfectly fine in SLES: folding in good work is a part of what distros are about.
But I cannot find anything in stable-kernel-rules.rst that would admit them - perhaps that's just out of date?
If -stable is to be a compendium of "this looks nice, you might like to include it", so be it: but the rules should then be updated.
Hugh