Re: [PATCH AUTOSEL for 4.14 015/161] printk: Add console owner and waiter logic to load balance console writes

From: Jiri Kosina
Date: Mon Apr 16 2018 - 16:43:40 EST


On Mon, 16 Apr 2018, Sasha Levin wrote:

> So I think that Linus's claim that users come first applies here as
> well. If there's a user that cares about a particular feature being
> broken, then we go ahead and fix his bug rather then ignoring him.

So one extreme is fixing -stable *iff* users actually do report an issue.

The other extreme is backporting everything that potentially looks like a
potential fix of "something" (according to some arbitrary metric),
pro-actively.

The former voilates the "users first" rule, the latter has a very, very
high risk of regressions.

So this whole debate is about finding a compromise.

My gut feeling always was that the statement in

Documentation/process/stable-kernel-rules.rst

is very reasonable, but making the process way more "aggresive" when
backporting patches is breaking much of its original spirit for me.

--
Jiri Kosina
SUSE Labs