On Mon, Sep 29, 2008 at 09:16:56PM +0200, Quentin Garnier wrote: > 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. One thing I was thinking of doing after 5.0 was implementing the suggestion of supporting both threading libraries at once. As I understood it, the idea is to add the old SA libpthread back to current and have it install somewhere else. Say /usr/lib/sa/libpthread. Then you could just flip a sysctl and start using it. The other alternative would be a pkg that does the same. Take care, Bill
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