On Mon, Sep 29, 2008 at 11:43:17AM -0700, Bill Stouder-Studenmund wrote: > On Mon, Sep 29, 2008 at 10:39:18AM -0400, Christos Zoulas wrote: [...] > What still isn't clear to me is what exactly the negatives are of > revivesa. > > The biggest one I'm hearing is that a number of people HATE it. Flat out > HATE it. I'm not really sure what to do with this one, since it's hard to > understand. It's an emotion, and we usually try to stick to technical > points. > > The SA that's on revivesa is a kernel option. If you don't want it, don't > enable it. If we find a catastrophic flaw in it (or security issue) late > in the 5.0 release proces, we turn it off in the default kernels and tell > people to only re-enable it with caution. > > SA is not becoming, nor do I ever envision it becoming, the default > threading out-of-the-box for NetBSD. Some sites may eventually prefer it, > but that's a specialized situation. And something an admin would have to > explicitly select. The main issue with SA is maintainability. We failed to maintain it once, how likely are we to succeed now? I have a lot of respect for your work on that, but I don't really see anyone maintaining it if for some reason you can't really do it anymore. Supposing it will be enabled by default, it won't be at risk of simply rotting; but merely compiling doesn't equal working, especially for a piece of code that is affected by many different areas of the kernel, including MD ones. And once 5.0 is out, it will hardly be tested until 6.0 is ready for release because you don't upgrade a system from a release to current the same way you upgrade a system from one release to another. The GDT issue is a perfect example of that. So while I find Andrew's and more importantly Mindaugas's attitudes to be overly passionate and not just purely technical, I understand the underlying concern. That said, having to make the decision of merging or not revivesa is a lot better that not even having that option, in my opinion. -- Quentin Garnier - cube%cubidou.net@localhost - cube%NetBSD.org@localhost "See the look on my face from staying too long in one place [...] every time the morning breaks I know I'm closer to falling" KT Tunstall, Saving My Face, Drastic Fantastic, 2007.
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