Re: [PATCH v3 02/14] arm64: drop ranges in definition of ARCH_FORCE_MAX_ORDER

[Justin Forbes]

On Wed, Apr 19, 2023 at 6:12 AM Catalin Marinas <catalin.marinas@xxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> On Tue, Apr 18, 2023 at 03:05:57PM -0700, Andrew Morton wrote:
> > On Wed, 12 Apr 2023 18:27:08 +0100 Catalin Marinas <catalin.marinas@xxxxxxx> wrote:
> > > > It sounds nice in theory. In practice. EXPERT hides too much. When you
> > > > flip expert, you expose over a 175ish new config options which are
> > > > hidden behind EXPERT.  You don't have to know what you are doing just
> > > > with the MAX_ORDER, but a whole bunch more as well.  If everyone were
> > > > already running 10, this might be less of a problem. At least Fedora
> > > > and RHEL are running 13 for 4K pages on aarch64. This was not some
> > > > accidental choice, we had to carry a patch to even allow it for a
> > > > while.  If this does go in as is, we will likely just carry a patch to
> > > > remove the "if EXPERT", but that is a bit of a disservice to users who
> > > > might be trying to debug something else upstream, bisecting upstream
> > > > kernels or testing a patch.  In those cases, people tend to use
> > > > pristine upstream sources without distro patches to verify, and they
> > > > tend to use their existing configs. With this change, their MAX_ORDER
> > > > will drop to 10 from 13 silently.   That can look like a different
> > > > issue enough to ruin a bisect or have them give bad feedback on a
> > > > patch because it introduces a "regression" which is not a regression
> > > > at all, but a config change they couldn't see.
> > >
> > > If we remove EXPERT (as prior to this patch), I'd rather keep the ranges
> > > and avoid having to explain to people why some random MAX_ORDER doesn't
> > > build (keeping the range would also make sense for randconfig, not sure
> > > we got to any conclusion there).
> >
> > Well this doesn't seem to have got anywhere.  I think I'll send the
> > patchset into Linus for the next merge window as-is.  Please let's take
> > a look at this Kconfig presentation issue during the following -rc
> > cycle.
>
> That's fine by me. I have a slight preference to drop EXPERT and keep
> the ranges in, especially if it affects current distro kernels. Debian
> seems to enable EXPERT already in their arm64 kernel config but I'm not
> sure about the Fedora or other distro kernels. If they don't, we can
> fix/revert this Kconfig entry once the merging window is closed.

Fedora and RHEL do not enable EXPERT already.

Justin