linux-kernel - Re: AIM7 40% regression with 2.6.26-rc1

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Date:	Wed, 7 May 2008 08:02:23 -0700 (PDT)
From:	Linus Torvalds <torvalds@...ux-foundation.org>
To:	Alan Cox <alan@...rguk.ukuu.org.uk>
cc:	Andi Kleen <andi@...stfloor.org>, Matthew Wilcox <matthew@....cx>,
	"Zhang, Yanmin" <yanmin_zhang@...ux.intel.com>,
	Ingo Molnar <mingo@...e.hu>,
	LKML <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>,
	Alexander Viro <viro@....linux.org.uk>,
	Andrew Morton <akpm@...ux-foundation.org>
Subject: Re: AIM7 40% regression with 2.6.26-rc1



On Wed, 7 May 2008, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> 
> Quite frankly, maybe we _need_ to have a bad BKL for those to ever get 
> fixed. As it was, people worked on trying to make the BKL behave better, 
> and it was a failure. Rather than spend the effort on trying to make it 
> work better (at a horrible cost), why not just say "Hell no - if you have 
> issues with it, you need to work with people to get rid of the BKL 
> rather than cluge around it".

Put another way: if we had introduced the BKL-as-semaphore with a known 
40% performance drop in AIM7, I would simply never ever have accepted the 
patch in the first place, regardless of _any_ excuses. 

Performance is a feature too.

Now, just because the code is already merged should not be an excuse for 
it then being shown to be bad. It's not a valid excuse to say "but we 
already merged it, so we can't unmerge it". We sure as hell _can_ unmerge 
it. 

			Linus
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