On Mon, Apr 16, 2018 at 06:06:08PM +0200, Pavel Machek wrote:
On Mon 2018-04-16 15:50:34, Sasha Levin wrote:
On Mon, Apr 16, 2018 at 05:30:31PM +0200, Pavel Machek wrote:
On Mon 2018-04-16 08:18:09, Linus Torvalds wrote:
On Mon, Apr 16, 2018 at 6:30 AM, Steven Rostedt rostedt@goodmis.org wrote:
I wonder if the "AUTOSEL" patches should at least have an "ack-by" from someone before they are pulled in. Otherwise there may be some subtle issues that can find their way into stable releases.
I don't know about anybody else, but I get so many of the patch-bot patches for stable etc that I will *not* reply to normal cases. Only if there's some issue with a patch will I reply.
I probably do get more than most, but still - requiring active participation for the steady flow of normal stable patches is almost pointless.
Just look at the subject line of this thread. The numbers are so big that you almost need exponential notation for them.
Question is if we need that many stable patches? Autosel seems to be picking up race conditions in LED state and W+X page fixes... I'd really like to see less stable patches.
Why? Given that the kernel keeps seeing more and more lines of code in each new release, tools around the kernel keep evolving (new fuzzers, testing suites, etc), and code gets more eyes, this guarantees that you'll see more and more stable patches for each release as well.
Is there a reason not to take LED fixes if they fix a bug and don't cause a regression? Sure, we can draw some arbitrary line, maybe designate some subsystems that are more "important" than others, but what's the point?
There's a tradeoff.
You want to fix serious bugs in stable, and you really don't want regressions in stable. And ... stable not having 1000s of patches would be nice, too.
I don't think we should use a number cap here, but rather look at the regression rate: how many patches broke something?
Since the rate we're seeing now with AUTOSEL is similar to what we were seeing before AUTOSEL, what's the problem it's causing?
That means you want to ignore not-so-serious bugs, because benefit of fixing them is lower than risk of the regressions. I believe bugs that do not bother anyone should _not_ be fixed in stable.
That was case of the LED patch. Yes, the commit fixed bug, but it introduced regressions that were fixed by subsequent patches.
How do you know if a bug bothers someone?
If a user is annoyed by a LED issue, is he expected to triage the bug, report it on LKML and patiently wait for the appropriate patch to be backported?