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SubjectRe: [PATCH 4/4] BKL: move CONFIG_BKL to staging
From
Most the x.25 BKLs have patches accepted over the past few months.
There are 3 remaining in send, receive and destroy that I haven't had
time to work through. If anyone wants to take a look at them I can
help test, but I wont have time until march to focus on them myself.

Andrew

On Thu, Jan 20, 2011 at 5:21 AM, Nick Bowler <nbowler@elliptictech.com> wrote:
> On 2011-01-19 17:17 +0100, Arnd Bergmann wrote:
>> On Wednesday 19 January 2011, Nick Bowler wrote:
>> > I think this patch is not very nice.  It will cause working kernel
>> > configurations to turn into broken kernel configurations when the user
>> > does 'make oldconfig', with no warning.
>> >
>> > These drivers that use the BKL work fine.  Removing working features
>> > with no adequate replacement available seems like a serious regression
>> > to me.
>>
>> I wouldn't call it a serious regression since the code is still there
>> and both the symptom and the solution are rather obvious.
>
> Well, the code wouldn't still be there if they're removed in 2.6.39 as
> stated in your patch description.  While it may be obvious to people
> like you and me who know what the BKL is, I don't it's obvious to
> everyone that the cause of "my system doesn't boot anymore" is "oh,
> someone moved a dependency of a driver I've been using without issue for
> the past 5 years to staging!"
>
>> What's more important is to make any people still relying on the code
>> aware that it's going away unless someone fixes it, so they have the
>> chance to send patches or pay someone to fix it for them.
>
> Shouldn't the onus for fixing *working* drivers (or encouraging others
> to fix them) lie with the person(s) who are so keen to kill off features
> that they use?
>
> Surely we don't need to break oldconfig just to raise awareness that
> these drivers use deprecated features?
>
>> The remaining drivers that are still relying on the BKL are very
>> rarely used and for the less obscure ones (ufs, ipx and x.25), people
>> have volunteered to fix them (though I have seen no proper patches
>> for these yet).
>>
>> For the rest, I suppose if nobody complains, they can actually go
>> away, according to the logic that if nobody is using them, they most
>> likely are broken anyway and more a security risk than they are worth.
>
> Notwithstanding any of the above, one release cycle hardly seems like
> enough time to infer from "nobody complained" that "not a single person
> uses this driver."  Surely people concerned with security issues in code
> that they don't use can just... not enable it?  Nobody's forcing anyone
> to use these drivers.
>
> Neither the BKL nor any of these drivers are even mentioned in the
> feature removal schedule yet.
>
> --
> Nick Bowler, Elliptic Technologies (http://www.elliptictech.com/)
> --
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