Re: [RFC PATCH v0.1 0/9] UMCG early preview/RFC patchset

From: Jonathan Corbet
Date: Fri May 21 2021 - 15:18:00 EST


Peter Oskolkov <posk@xxxxxxxxxx> writes:

> On Fri, May 21, 2021 at 8:08 AM Jonathan Corbet <corbet@xxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> [...]
>> Documentation patches can help to guide that discussion; they also need
>> to be reviewed as well. So yes, I think they should be present from the
>> beginning. But then, that's the position I'm supposed to take :) This
>> is a big change to the kernel's system-call API, I don't think that
>> there can be a proper discussion of that without a description of what
>> you're trying to do.
>
> Hi Jon,
>
> There are doc comments in patches 2 and 7 in umcg.c documenting the
> new syscalls. That said, I'll prepare a separate doc patch - I guess
> I'll add Documentation/scheduler/umcg.rst, unless you tell me there is
> a better place to do that. ETA mid-to-late next week.

Yes, I saw those; they are a bit terse at best. What are the "worker
states"? What's a "UMCG group"? Yes, all this can be worked out by
pounding one's head against the code for long enough, but you're asking
a fair amount of your reviewers.

A good overall description would be nice, perhaps for the userspace-api
book. But *somebody* is also going to have to write real man pages for
all these system calls; if you provided those, the result should be a
good description of how you expect this subsystem to work.

Thanks,

jon