Re: 2.6.22 -mm merge plans: slub

From: Andrew Morton
Date: Tue May 01 2007 - 16:38:31 EST


On Tue, 1 May 2007 21:19:09 +0100 (BST)
Hugh Dickins <hugh@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> On Tue, 1 May 2007, Andrew Morton wrote:
> > On Tue, 1 May 2007 19:10:29 +0100 (BST)
> > Hugh Dickins <hugh@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >
> > > > Most of the rest of slub. Will merge it all.
> > >
> > > Merging slub already? I'm surprised.
> >
> > My thinking here is "does slub have a future".
> > I think the answer is "yes",
>
> I think I agree with that,
> though it's a judgement I'd leave to you and others.
>
> > so we're reasonably safe getting it into mainline for the finishing
> > work. The kernel.org kernel will still default to slab.
> >
> > Does that sound wrong?
>
> Yes, to me it does. If it could be defaulted to on throughout the
> -rcs, on every architecture, then I'd say that's "finishing work";
> and we'd be safe knowing we could go back to slab in a hurry if
> needed. But it hasn't reached that stage yet, I think.
>

Given the current state and the current rate of development I'd expect slub
to have reached the level of completion which you're describing around -rc2
or -rc3. I think we'd be pretty safe making that assumption.

This is a bit unusual but there is of course some self-interest here: the
patch dependencies are getting awful and having this hanging around
out-of-tree will make 2.6.23 development harder for everyone.

So on balance, given that we _do_ expect slub to have a future, I'm
inclined to crash ahead with it. The worst that can happen will be a later
rm mm/slub.c which would be pretty simple to do.

otoh I could do some frantic patch mangling and make it easier to carry
slub out-of-tree, but do we gain much from that?
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