Re: [PATCH 4/4] staging: lustre: obdclass: change object lookup to no wait mode

[Greg Kroah-Hartman]

On Tue, May 15, 2018 at 04:02:55PM +0100, James Simmons wrote:
> > >  	/*
> > >  	 * Allocate new object. This may result in rather complicated
> > >  	 * operations, including fld queries, inode loading, etc.
> > >  	 */
> > >  	o = lu_object_alloc(env, dev, f, conf);
> > > -	if (IS_ERR(o))
> > > +	if (unlikely(IS_ERR(o)))
> > >  		return o;
> > >  
> > 
> > This is an unrelated and totally pointless.  likely/unlikely annotations
> > hurt readability, and they should only be added if it's something which
> > is going to show up in benchmarking.  lu_object_alloc() is already too
> > slow for the unlikely() to make a difference and anyway IS_ERR() has an
> > unlikely built in so it's duplicative...
> 
> Sounds like a good checkpatch case to test for :-) Some people like to try
> and milk ever cycle they can. Personally for me I never use those 
> annotations. With modern processors I'm skeptical if their benefits.
> I do cleanup up the patches to some extent to make it compliant with 
> kernel standards but leave the core code in place for people to comment 
> on.
> 
> > Anyway, I understand that Intel has been ignoring kernel.org instead of
> > sending forwarding their patches properly so you're doing a difficult
> > and thankless job...  Thanks for that.  I'm sure it's frustrating to
> > look at these patches for you as well.
> 
> Thank you for the complement. Also thank you for taking time to review
> these patches. Your feedback is most welcomed and benefitical to the
> health of the lustre client.
> 
> Sadly its not just Intel but other vendors that don't directly contribute
> to the linux lustre client. I have spoke to the vendors about contributing 
> and they all say the same thing. No working with drivers in the staging 
> tree. Sadly all the parties involved are very interested in the success 
> of the lustre client. No one has ever told me directly why they don't get
> involved but I suspect it has to deal with 2 reasons. One is that staging
> drivers are not normally enabled by distributions so their clients 
> normally will never deal with the staging lustre client. Secondly vendors
> just lack the man power to contribute in a meanful way.

If staging is hurting you, why is it in staging at all?  Why not just
drop it, go off and spend a few months to clean up all the issues in
your own tree (with none of those pesky requirements of easy-to-review
patches) and then submit a "clean" filesystem for inclusion in the
"real" part of the kernel tree?

It doesn't sound like anyone is actually using this code in the tree
as-is, so why even keep it here?

thanks,

greg k-h