Messages in this thread | | | Date | Sun, 13 May 2007 20:36:30 -0400 | From | Bill Davidsen <> | Subject | Re: [PATCH] swsusp: Use platform mode by default |
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Rafael J. Wysocki wrote: > On Friday, 11 May 2007 18:30, Linus Torvalds wrote: >> On Fri, 11 May 2007, Rafael J. Wysocki wrote: >>> We're working on fixing the breakage, but currently it's difficult, because >>> none of my testboxes has problems with the 'platform' hibernation and I >>> cannot reproduce the reported issues. >> The rule for anything ACPI-related has been: no regressions. >> >> It doesn't matter if something fixes 10 boxes, if it breaks a single one, >> it's going to get reverted. > > [Well, I think I should stop explaining decisions that weren't mine. Yet, I > feel responsible for patches that I sign-off.] > > Just to clarify, the change in question isn't new. It was introduced by the > commit 9185cfa92507d07ac787bc73d06c42222eec7239 before 2.6.20, at Seife's > request and with Pavel's acceptance. > >> We had much too much of the "two steps forward, one step back" dance with >> ACPI a few years ago, which is the reason that rule got installed (and >> which is why it's ACPI-only: in some other subsystems we accept the fact >> that sometimes we don't know how to fix some hardware issue, but the new >> situation is at least better than the old one). >> >> I agree that it can be aggravating to know that you can fix a problem for >> some people, but then being limited by the fact that it breaks for others. >> But beign able to *rely* on something that used to work is just too >> important, and with ACPI, you can never make a good judgement of which way >> works better (since it really just depends on some random firmware issues >> that we have zero visibility into). >> >> Also, quite often, it may *seem* like something fixes more boxes than it >> breaks, but it's because people report *breakage* only, and then a few >> months later it turns out that it's exactly the other way around: now it's >> a hundred people who report breakage with the *new* code, and the reason >> people thought it fixed more than it broke was that the people for whom >> the old code worked fine obviously never reported it! >> >> So this is why "a single regression is considered more important than ten >> fixes" - because a single regressionr report tends to actually be just the >> first indication of a lot of people who simply haven't tested the new code >> yet! People for whom the old code is broken are more likely to test new >> things. >> >> So I'd just suggest changing the default back to PM_DISK_SHUTDOWN (but >> leave the "pm_ops->enter" testing in place - ie not reverting the other >> commits in the series). > > The series actually preserves the 2.6.20/21 behavior. By defaulting back to > PM_DISK_SHUTDOWN, we'll cause some users for whom 2.6.20 and 2.6.21 work to > report this change as a regression, so please let me avoid making this decision > (I'm not the maintainer of the hibernation code after all). > > The problem is that we don't know about regressions until somebody reports them > and if that happens after two affected kernel releases, what should we do? > I think that one of the reasons people (guilty) don't report problems with suspend and hibernate is that it's been a problem on and off and when it breaks people don't bother to chase it, they just don't use it unless it's critical, or they install suspend2.
I only suggest that if 'platform' is more correct use that, don't change it again. Then fix platform.
-- Bill Davidsen <davidsen@tmr.com> "We have more to fear from the bungling of the incompetent than from the machinations of the wicked." - from Slashdot - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
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