Re: Article in Phoronix about loss of performance in 2.6.35 releasecandidates

From: Bill Davidsen
Date: Mon May 31 2010 - 23:15:20 EST


Robert Hancock wrote:
On 05/31/2010 05:19 PM, Alex Buell wrote:
http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=14976

Question: Why?

Good question.. I guess it would too much to ask of them to try to figure out what area the problem lies in (even to the point of figuring out if it's a CPU or IO-bound problem), or try to bisect, or at least report it to LKML before going to the trouble of creating 5 pages of graphs.. Given the 20x slowdown in some of the benchmarks you'd think it wouldn't be too hard to narrow down.

That's true, but 20x should be too hard for people to detect when they do QA after creating a patch, before sending it to LKML in the first place, either. If such a regression made it to an -rc1 then it really is kind of a big deal. Of course Phoronics running the tests on netbook processors is probably a good thing, I doubt many developers and testers are compiling kernels on a rig like that, or doing much of anything else demanding.

I guess I would expect people to react with dismay to the fact that such a problem made it undetected to rc stage, but perhaps I have too much respect for developers. This looks more like "how dare they not keep it quiet and just tell us" indignation. In the end I doubt it makes a lot of difference, if someone posted to LKML and Slashdot picked it up, be sure it would have hit the media anyway.

Should any media keep a defect quiet when they make their living informing the readers? I see a lot of glee among Linux users every few days when a new Windows bug becomes public. Phoronics tested and reported, why is that less honorable than Tom's Hardware telling us a new CPU sucks?


--
Bill Davidsen <davidsen@xxxxxxx>
"We have more to fear from the bungling of the incompetent than from
the machinations of the wicked." - from Slashdot
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