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

[Steven Rostedt]

On Mon, 16 Apr 2018 08:18:09 -0700
Linus Torvalds <torvalds@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> On Mon, Apr 16, 2018 at 6:30 AM, Steven Rostedt <rostedt@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >
> > I wonder if the "AUTOSEL" patches should at least have an "ack-by" from
> > someone before they are pulled in. Otherwise there may be some subtle
> > issues that can find their way into stable releases.  
> 
> I don't know about anybody else, but I  get so many of the patch-bot
> patches for stable etc that I will *not* reply to normal cases. Only
> if there's some issue with a patch will I reply.
> 
> I probably do get more than most, but still - requiring active
> participation for the steady flow of normal stable patches is almost
> pointless.
> 
> Just look at the subject line of this thread. The numbers are so big
> that you almost need exponential notation for them.
> 

I'm worried about just backporting patches that nobody actually looked
at. Is someone going through and vetting that these should definitely
be added to stable. I would like to have some trusted human (doesn't
even need to be the author or maintainer of the patch) to look at all
the patches before they are applied.

I would say anything more than a trivial patch would require author or
sub maintainer ack. Look at this patch, I don't think it should go to
stable, even though it does fix issues. But the fix is for systems
already having issues, and this keeps printk from making things worse.
The fix has side effects that other commits have addressed, and if this
patch gets backported, those other ones must too.

Maybe I was too strong by saying all patches should be acked, but
anything more than buffer overflows and off by one errors probably
require a bit more vetting by a human than to just pull in all patches
that a bot flags to be backported.

-- Steve