netdev - Re: [PATCH AUTOSEL 4.9 09/26] net/mlx5e: Init ethtool steering for representors

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Message-ID: <c9496a54-1b68-5d49-6866-d357c75f7a82@solarflare.com>
Date:   Mon, 20 Apr 2020 12:45:36 +0100
From:   Edward Cree <ecree@...arflare.com>
To:     Sasha Levin <sashal@...nel.org>
CC:     Or Gerlitz <gerlitz.or@...il.com>,
        Greg KH <gregkh@...uxfoundation.org>,
        Jakub Kicinski <kuba@...nel.org>,
        Stable <stable@...r.kernel.org>,
        "Linux Netdev List" <netdev@...r.kernel.org>,
        Saeed Mahameed <saeedm@...lanox.com>,
        David Miller <davem@...emloft.net>
Subject: Re: [PATCH AUTOSEL 4.9 09/26] net/mlx5e: Init ethtool steering for
 representors

On 16/04/2020 19:49, Sasha Levin wrote:
> Just a question while I process your explanation (thanks for doing it!):
> wouldn't this be done by the neural network?
Yes, in the basic case.  (Hopefully we're agreed that this is a long way
 from "I'm not sure what a fixes tag has to do with inclusion in a stable
 tree.", which is how this whole brouhaha started.)
> It learns what a stable worthy commit is (and what isn't), and applies
> weights based on these findings, right? So if it learns that most
> non-stable commits don't have a fixes tag, it's likely to use that and
> "require" other inputs to have enough weight to compensate over a
> missing fixes tag so that it'll pass the threshold, no?
Yes.  The problem comes when there are other inputs the NN doesn't have,
 that ought to screen off some of the information it's using.  This is
 probably best illustrated by an unrealistic extreme case...
Let's imagine hypothetically that the maintainer of drivers/blub is an
 absolutely perfect judge of which patches should go to -stable, and
 that the transmission path from him to the stable trees never loses a
 patch.  This would mean that every autosel patch in drivers/blub is
 necessarily a false positive, because all the 'true positives' it might
 have found have already been taken out of the pool, so to speak.  But
 if the NN is just trained to discriminate patches on whether they end
 up going to stable, it won't see any difference between a drivers/blub
 patch that the maintainer sent to stable straight away and a
 drivers/wibble patch that the latter's less diligent maintainer didn't
 forward and that only got picked up later when a stable kernel user
 encountered the bug it was fixing.
As long as the NN doesn't have that piece of information, it's going to
 either generate lots of false positives in drivers/blub or lots of
 false negatives in drivers/wibble.
Now obviously drivers/blub doesn't exist, no maintainer is 100% perfect
 at -stable submissions; but any difference will produce the same
 effect on a smaller scale, with the 'blubbish' maintainers seeing a
 high false positive fraction while from the 'wibblesome' maintainer's
 point of view autosel is working great.  And since the 'blubs' are the
 ones who're putting effort of their own into stable selection already,
 they get aggrieved at having to also put effort into catching the
 false positives from a system that doesn't seem to be doing much for
 them, and everyone ends up shouting at each other as we're seeing here.

(Do you want me to do another worked numerical example demonstrating the
 above, or does it make enough sense in words not to need one?)

-ed