On Mon, Apr 19, 2021, Sasha Levin wrote:
On Mon, Apr 19, 2021 at 09:54:18PM +0000, Sean Christopherson wrote:
Maybe we'll end up with a more painful conflict in the future that would be best solved by grabbing this refactoring, but I don't think we're there yet.
This is the tricky part: when we start having these conflicts it's usually too late to refactor, no one cares, and backports just don't happen.
I'd actually point to the file shuffling (commits like a821bab2d1ee ("KVM: VMX: Move VMX specific files to a "vmx" subdirectory")) you did a few years ago in arch/x86/kvm/ as an example to why we can't wait: those changes made a lot of sense upstream, but for stable kernels it meant that patches were now trying to touch the wrong files and would often fail or do the wrong thing.
On hindsight, we probably should have moved files around in stable trees as well to match what upstream had, but at this point it's too late to go back and fix that, and we're stuck manually editing paths for the lifetime of most of the LTS trees.
And I guess there's also the argument that inducing even a handful of manual backports is more risky overall than taking this one "unnecessary" patch.
Objection withdrawn, I don't have a strong opinion either way :-)