linux-kernel - Re: Article in Phoronix about loss of performance in 2.6.35 release candidates

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Date:	Mon, 31 May 2010 21:22:38 -0600
From:	Robert Hancock <hancockrwd@...il.com>
To:	Bill Davidsen <davidsen@....com>
Cc:	alex.buell@...ted.org.uk,
	Mailing Lists - Kernel Developers 
	<linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>, Dave Airlie <airlied@...il.com>
Subject: Re: Article in Phoronix about loss of performance in 2.6.35 release 
	candidates

On Mon, May 31, 2010 at 9:15 PM, Bill Davidsen <davidsen@....com> wrote:
> Robert Hancock wrote:
>>
>> On 05/31/2010 05:19 PM, Alex Buell wrote:
>>>
>>> http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=14976
>>>
>>> Question: Why?
>>
>> Good question.. I guess it would too much to ask of them to try to figure
>> out what area the problem lies in (even to the point of figuring out if it's
>> a CPU or IO-bound problem), or try to bisect, or at least report it to LKML
>> before going to the trouble of creating 5 pages of graphs.. Given the 20x
>> slowdown in some of the benchmarks you'd think it wouldn't be too hard to
>> narrow down.
>
> That's true, but 20x should be too hard for people to detect when they do QA
> after creating a patch, before sending it to LKML in the first place,
> either. If such a regression made it to an -rc1 then it really is kind of a
> big deal. Of course Phoronics running the tests on netbook processors is
> probably a good thing, I doubt many developers and testers are compiling
> kernels on a rig like that, or doing much of anything else demanding.
>
> I guess I would expect people to react with dismay to the fact that such a
> problem made it undetected to rc stage, but perhaps I have too much respect
> for developers. This looks more like "how dare they not keep it quiet and
> just tell us" indignation. In the end I doubt it makes a lot of difference,
> if someone posted to LKML and Slashdot picked it up, be sure it would have
> hit the media anyway.
>
> Should any media keep a defect quiet when they make their living informing
> the readers? I see a lot of glee among Linux users every few days when a new
> Windows bug becomes public. Phoronics tested and reported, why is that less
> honorable than Tom's Hardware telling us a new CPU sucks?

Of course they shouldn't keep it quiet. The problem is they went and
wrote an article that was basically "OMG HUGE PERFORMANCE LOSS!!1!!"
without reporting the problem to people that can actually do something
about it, and also didn't provide any very useful details like dmesg,
config, etc. that might let someone figure out what's going on.
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