linux-kernel - Re: 5.13.2-rc and others have many not for stable

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Date:   Wed, 14 Jul 2021 11:30:46 -0400
From:   Sasha Levin <sashal@...nel.org>
To:     Michal Hocko <mhocko@...e.com>
Cc:     Andrew Morton <akpm@...ux-foundation.org>,
        Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@...uxfoundation.org>,
        Hugh Dickins <hughd@...gle.com>,
        Linus Torvalds <torvalds@...ux-foundation.org>,
        Mike Kravetz <mike.kravetz@...cle.com>,
        Miaohe Lin <linmiaohe@...wei.com>,
        linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org, linux-mm@...ck.org,
        stable@...r.kernel.org
Subject: Re: 5.13.2-rc and others have many not for stable

On Wed, Jul 14, 2021 at 09:52:58AM +0200, Michal Hocko wrote:
>On Tue 13-07-21 18:28:13, Andrew Morton wrote:
>> At present this -stable
>> promiscuity is overriding the (sometime carefully) considered decisions
>> of the MM developers, and that's a bit scary.
>
>Not only scary, it is also a waste of precious time of those who
>carefuly evaluate stable tree backports.

I'm just as concerned with the other direction: we end up missing quite
a lot of patches that are needed in practice, and no one is circling
back to make sure that we have everything we need.

I took a peek at SUSE's tree to see how things work there, and looking
at the very latest mm/ commit:

commit c8c7b321edcf7a7e8c22dc66e0366f72aa2390f0
Author: Michal Koutný <mkoutny@...e.com>
Date:   Tue May 4 11:12:10 2021 +0200

     mm: memcontrol: fix cpuhotplug statistics flushing
     (bsc#1185606).

     suse-commit: 3bba386a33fac144abf2507554cb21552acb16af

This seems to be commit a3d4c05a4474 ("mm: memcontrol: fix cpuhotplug
statistics flushing") upstream, and I assume that it was picked because
it fixed a real bug someone cares about.

I can maybe understand that at the time that the patch was
written/committed it didn't seem like stable@ material and thus there
was no cc to stable.

But once someone realized it needs to be backported, why weren't we told
to take it into stable too?

-- 
Thanks,
Sasha