On Thu, Jun 23, 2011 at 2:39 PM, Nicolas Pitre nicolas.pitre@linaro.org wrote:
On Thu, 23 Jun 2011, Andy Green wrote:
Hi -
I mentioned this already to npitre but for various reasons we are planning to target 3.0 kernel rather than linux-linaro-2.6.39 at the moment. 2.6.39 has some known issues like no onboard audio or HDMI audio, but since 3.0 has a new and better ALSA implementation for Panda I'm not sure it's worth spending time on when the old implementation won't really go into linux-linaro even if we did forward-port it again.
$ git diff --shortstat v2.6.39..linaro-2.6.39 sound/ 158 files changed, 20097 insertions(+), 6899 deletions(-)
$ git diff --shortstat linaro-2.6.39..v3.0-rc4 sound/ 65 files changed, 4586 insertions(+), 3612 deletions(-)
So please lets stop that "linaro-2.6.39 is just 2.6.39" rhetoric when numbers show that linaro-2.6.39 is much closer to the strictly speaking still nonexistent 3.0 than 2.6.39.
When linux-linaro-3.0 is coming in the next weeks, we will use that as a base instead as before.
The base will be just as good as the contributions made by people to it. And besides a few notable exceptions such as yours, I didn't get much from people in terms of patches and/or pull requests.
I'm seriously starting to question the usefulness of the "Linaro" kernel tree in fact. For one year that I've been putting such a tree together, the feedback and response have been less than overwhelming. The idea was to _consolidate_ the work that the various groups within Linaro was producing into a single and coherent whole without screwing up the other groups' work, but so far this hasn't been a great success for various reasons.
So I'm asking people for comments about this tree.
- Is this useful?
- Is it important?
- Are _you_ using it?
- Is solving the ARM fragmentation problem still a Linaro priority?
- Is the Linaro kernel effective for this?
Half a year ago when I did ask for comments about the usefulness of the linaro-next tree, I got almost no responses as I suspected, and I therefore dropped that tree to concentrate my efforts on the Linaro "stable" branches. If even the stable branch doesn't steer more interest than it does now then this effort is just wasted. Either our process is to blame, our priorities are wrong, or some efforts are diverted where they shouldn't.
One reason for the Linaro tree was to help LTs moving ahead rather than sticking to ancient kernels. Now it seems that everyone wants to get ahead of the actual latest release from kernel.org which is a radical shift. Does this mean that vendors and co now are getting used to the upstream pace and they're going to move to a rebasing workflow for real, or they're just fooled by the marketing prospects of a meaningless major kernel version bump? If the former that would be wonderful and maybe the Linaro kernel outlived its usefulness. If the later... well... what can I say here?
In any case that doesn't make a strong case for the "Linaro" kernel. We could as well just patch the latest Ubuntu kernel, the latest Android kernel, or whatever existing distro or vendor kernel, in order to showcase the Linaro initiated work and results. In practice that's what I see people doing right now anyway. Pushing that work into mainline is what matters the most in the end, and _that_ should always be Linaro's top priority.
I don't feel compelled to fight for the survival of the Linaro kernel either if it is not widely used and significantly useful. I'm more effective fighting with mainline kernel people: it is much more interesting and useful with lasting results.
Opinions anyone?
+1
We are still a few patches away (about 85 at my last count) from having a good experience on the mainline with the BeagleBoard-xM. I want to see that count reach 0, hopefully by whatever is next after 3.0. No out-of-mainline patches has to be the goal.
Nicolas
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