Re: Linux 2.6.3-rc1

From: viro
Date: Fri Feb 06 2004 - 22:01:08 EST


On Fri, Feb 06, 2004 at 06:28:13PM -0800, Linus Torvalds wrote:
>
> Ok, this is another big merge of a number of pending patches, although to
> some degree the patches have now moved "outwards" from the core, and most
> of them are in driver land.
>
> There's a lot of network driver updates (have been in -mm and Jeff's
> testing trees for a while), and Al Viro has been fixing up not just
> network drivers, but also cursing over parport interfaces ;)
>
> Andrew's patches are all over, from fixing warnings with new versions of
> gcc to merging things like the ppc updates he had in his tree, and
> everything in between.
>
> On and a big ALSA update, along with SCSI updates (big qla update, for
> example).
>
> So let's calm down and make sure all the updates are ok.

One note: please, please, let's put a moratorium on sysfs-related patches
that didn't go through review. We are just getting netdev situation in
the main tree under control. It took nearly half a year (if not more).
And now we've got *exact* *copy* of the change that had started that mess -
this time in fbdev. Sure, there's fewer fbdev drivers, so it shouldn't
take that long. But then it's not 2.5 anymore...

If you are doing any sysfs integration - *fix* *lifetime* *rules* *first*.
You can do that in a way that will avoid breakage or need to revisit the
drivers when kobjects get embedded - just have your my_subsystem_release()
defined as kfree() and on the last step replace its body with kobject_put(),
moving the actual freeing into ->release().

Even if you are sure that you can fix all drivers in one go, there's no
need to turn the entire series into "must merge at once" monster - if nothing
else, reordering it that way will make testing easier. Sigh...
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