Re: [PATCH] staging: ion: remove from the tree

[John Stultz]

On Thu, Aug 27, 2020 at 10:17 AM Greg Kroah-Hartman
<gregkh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Thu, Aug 27, 2020 at 10:31:41PM +0530, Amit Pundir wrote:
> > I don't know what is the right thing to do here. I just want to
> > highlight that AOSP's audio (codec2) HAL depends on the ION system
> > heap and it will break AOSP for people who boot mainline on their
> > devices, even for just testing purpose like we do in Linaro. Right now
> > we need only 1 (Android specific out-of-tree) patch to boot AOSP with
> > mainline and Sumit is already trying to upstream that vma naming
> > patch. Removal of in-kernel ION, will just add more to that delta.
>
> As AOSP will continue to rely on ION after December of this year, all
> you are doing is postponing the inevitable a few more months.
>
> Push back on the Android team to fix up the code to not use ION, they
> know this needs to happen.

The point though, is your main premise that no one is using this isn't true.

I'm actively working with Hridya and folks on the codec2 HAL side to
transition this on the userland side:
  https://android-review.googlesource.com/c/platform/frameworks/av/+/1368918/3

I'd like AOSP to not use ION after September (though being external I
can't promise anything), much less continuing after December.

I want this migration to happen as much as anyone.  But I'd prefer to
keep ION in staging until after the LTS is announced. Having both
around helps development for the transition, which helps us have a
reliable solution, which helps vendors to migrate and be able to do
comparative performance testing.

I do appreciate that keeping it isn't free, but I also don't feel the
chaos-monkey approach here is really motivational in the way you
intend.

thanks
-john