linux-kernel - Re: RSDL v0.31

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Date:	Tue, 20 Mar 2007 08:31:42 -0700 (PDT)
From:	Linus Torvalds <torvalds@...ux-foundation.org>
To:	Willy Tarreau <w@....eu>
cc:	Xavier Bestel <xavier.bestel@...e.fr>, Mark Lord <lkml@....ca>,
	Al Boldi <a1426z@...ab.com>, Mike Galbraith <efault@....de>,
	Con Kolivas <kernel@...ivas.org>, ck@....kolivas.org,
	Serge Belyshev <belyshev@...ni.sinp.msu.ru>,
	Ingo Molnar <mingo@...e.hu>, linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org,
	Nicholas Miell <nmiell@...cast.net>,
	Andrew Morton <akpm@...ux-foundation.org>
Subject: Re: RSDL v0.31

On Tue, 20 Mar 2007, Willy Tarreau wrote:
> 
> Linus, you're unfair with Con. He initially was on this position, and lately
> worked with Mike by proposing changes to try to improve his X responsiveness.

I was not actually so much speaking about Con, as about a lot of the 
tone in general here. And yes, it's not been entirely black and white. I 
was very happy to see the "try this patch" email from Al Boldi - not 
because I think that patch per se was necessarily the right fix (I have no 
idea), but simply because I think that's the kind of mindset we need to 
have.

Not a lot of people really *like* the old scheduler, but it's been tweaked 
over the years to try to avoid some nasty behaviour. I'm really hoping 
that RSDL would be a lot better (and by all accounts it has the potential 
for that), but I think it's totally naïve to expect that it won't need 
some tweaking too.

So I'll happily still merge RSDL right after 2.6.21 (and it won't even be 
a config option - if we want to make it good, we need to make sure 
*everybody* tests it), but what I want to see is that "can do" spirit wrt 
tweaking for issues that come up.

Because let's face it - nothing is ever perfect. Even a really nice 
conceptual idea always ends up hitting the "but in real life, things are 
ugly and complex, and we've depended on behaviour X in the past and can't 
change it, so we need some tweaking for problem Y".

And everything is totally fixable - at least as long as people are willing 
to!

		Linus