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.