Re: Linux 2.4.10-pre11

[Stephan von Krawczynski]

On Tue, 18 Sep 2001 13:14:19 -0600 Andreas Dilger <[e-mail]>
wrote:

> On Sep 18, 2001  11:27 -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> [...]
> The real question is why can't we just open 2.5 and only fix the VM to
> start with?

Hm, I guess if anybody would be capable of _really_ fixing vm in upto-pre10
state, he would have done it already. It's not that people would not have
tried, but it looks like nobody is able to get the _whole_ picture of this.
Surely there are people that know a lot about certain parts of the (old) vm
code, and thats exactly what leads to this Linus' statements here sounding like
"I had a look at part xyz of it and it's a mess. Patch appended." (see pre10 vm
patch).
You have to keep in mind that a lot of people on the planet try to use 2.4 in a
unbelievably broad variety of setups - and quite a number of them relies on
released kernels. If you take a close look at 2.4.7, 2.4.8, 2.4.9 you may well
find out, that they're unusable compared to 2.2.19. You cannot go on like this.
I really do back Andrea and Linus for this step, because I can _see_ a great
win in performance _and_ things got less complex in this code. So there is a
much bigger chance to tilt the last remaining problems in short time (hopefully
before 2.4.10 or .11). 
So I guess the right thing to do now is give Andrea good input of leftover,
reproducible problems to give him a chance to fix them. A major discussion
about "doing it all the way round" makes only sense, if someone comes up with
something _at least_ as good as Andrea's code. 
Then its "Lonely Linus"' decision to choose. Whatever he will choose, a good
percentage LKML will be against it. This is a normal thing, the guy that has to
make the decision is alone most of the time. The only way for you to find out
if he is right is to _try_ it. If he is, tell him. If he isn't, send a patch.
He couldn't have been that wrong the last years, though.

</end sermon>

Just _one_ opinion from an unimportant guy,

Stephan