Re: [REGRESSION] Re: [PATCH] Revert "vmgenid: emit uevent when VMGENID updates"

From: Alexander Graf
Date: Tue Apr 23 2024 - 02:56:22 EST


Hey Jason,

On 23.04.24 03:21, Jason A. Donenfeld wrote:
Hi Alexander,

The process here seems weirdly aggressive and sneaky.

On 2023-06-19, I wrote that I didn't want to take this route for
userspace notifications.

Then on 2023-06-28, you wrote to Greg asking him to take it instead of
me. Nine minutes later, Greg said "yea sure." Then he caught up on the
thread and some hours later wrote:

Wait, no, I'm not the maintainer of this, Jason is. And he already
rejected it (and based on the changelog text, I would too), so why are
you asking me a month later to take this?

Work with the maintainer please, don't try to route around them, you
both know better than this.
Then on 2023-11-14 you wrote to me again asking me to take it, despite
my earlier reservations not changing in the interim. I didn't have a
chance to reply.

Then on 2023-11-30, Greg weirdly took it anyway, with zero discussion
or evidence on the mailing list as to what had happened.

When I noticed what had happened (while working on his driver in the
process of cleaning up/reworking patches that your Amazon employees
sent me that needed work), suspicious that you tried to "route around"
the proper way of getting this done and trick Greg again into taking a
patch that's not his purview, I asked him wtf happened on IRC:

<gregkh> ugh, sorry, I don't remember that. I think Alexander talked
to me at plumbers and said, "hey, please take this virt patch"
<gregkh> but you are right, you NAKed it in that thread, I forgot
that, sorry. Yes, revert it if that's needed.

Greg then ACK'd the revert commit which came with a stable@ marking
and a Fixes: tag (for 6.8, which isn't very old).

So it looks to me like you twice tried to trick Greg into taking this,
succeeded the second time, got caught, and now are trying to make a
regression argument as a means of keeping your sneaky commit in there.
All of this really _really_ rubs me the wrong way, I have to say.

I don't know what holds more weight here -- the predictable regression
argument, or the fact that you snuck nack'd changes into a very very
recent kernel that can still be removed while probably only affecting
you. But I'm obviously not happy about this.


I'm personally much more concerned about Linux' ability to deal with VM Clone events than "my personal use case". The group at Amazon you see working on this is working on AWS Lambda which owns the full host and guest stack, including Linux on both ends. They could happily patch their own Linux kernel. Instead, I have managed to get them to do "the right thing" and work with the Linux upstream community to build a viable solution that works for everyone.

However, every time they do that, all they get back is vgetrandom() arguments which are completely irrelevant to the conversation and deteriorate my efforts to get AWS to work *more* rather than less upstream. Can we please move this back to a technical discussion and based on technical grounds determine why sending a notification to user space when a VM was cloned via uevents is even remotely a bad idea?


Thanks,

Alex




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