Re: Linux regressions report for mainline [2023-10-29]

[Linus Torvalds]

On Sun, 29 Oct 2023 at 03:52, Regzbot (on behalf of Thorsten Leemhuis)
<regressions@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
>                          One of the remaining ones is new:
> module loading trouble on some laptops. Not nice, but likely nothing
> many users will encounter. The quota compilation oddity problem from
> Andy is also still around (unless it was fixed without me noticing); and
> a memleak, too.

The quota thing remains unexplained, and honestly seems like a timing
issue that just happens to hit Andy. Very strange, but I suspect that
without more reports (that may or may not ever happen), we're stuck.

> * There was another report about a blank screen during boot on a Lenovo
> laptop because simpledrm (that users apparently had enabled without
> problems beforehand) started to support those machines due to
> 60aebc9559492c ("drivers/firmware: Move sysfb_init() from
> device_initcall to subsys_initcall_sync"). I suggested a revert, but the
> developers disagree (to quote: "From my point of view, this is not a
> regression, 60aebc9559492c doesn't cause a problem, but exposes a
> problem.")

Honestly, "exposes a problem" is pretty much the *definition* of a
regression. So that excuse is particularly bad.

The whole point of "regression" is "things that used to work no longer work".

And no, "there's another bug that needs to be fixed" is _not_ the
answer - not unless you have that fix in hand.

That said, this already went into 6.5, so I'm not going to revert it
now just before the 6.6 release. That would be more dangerous than
just letting things be. But yes, a revert is likely the right thing to
do, unless people have figured out what is wrong with simplefb.

                 Linus