From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (qmail 30802 invoked by alias); 23 Dec 2008 21:13:50 -0000 Received: (qmail 30792 invoked by uid 22791); 23 Dec 2008 21:13:49 -0000 X-SWARE-Spam-Status: No, hits=-0.1 required=5.0 tests=AWL,BAYES_50,KAM_MX,SPF_HELO_PASS,SPF_PASS X-Spam-Status: No, hits=-0.1 required=5.0 tests=AWL,BAYES_50,KAM_MX,SPF_HELO_PASS,SPF_PASS X-Spam-Check-By: sourceware.org Received: from mx1.redhat.com (HELO mx1.redhat.com) (66.187.233.31) by sourceware.org (qpsmtpd/0.43rc1) with ESMTP; Tue, 23 Dec 2008 21:13:10 +0000 Received: from int-mx1.corp.redhat.com (int-mx1.corp.redhat.com [172.16.52.254]) by mx1.redhat.com (8.13.8/8.13.8) with ESMTP id mBNLD8JQ021308 for ; Tue, 23 Dec 2008 16:13:08 -0500 Received: from gateway.sf.frob.com (vpn-12-171.rdu.redhat.com [10.11.12.171]) by int-mx1.corp.redhat.com (8.13.1/8.13.1) with ESMTP id mBNLD7fN011077; Tue, 23 Dec 2008 16:13:08 -0500 Received: from magilla.sf.frob.com (magilla.sf.frob.com [198.49.250.228]) by gateway.sf.frob.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id A4793357B; Tue, 23 Dec 2008 13:13:06 -0800 (PST) Received: by magilla.sf.frob.com (Postfix, from userid 5281) id 67D29FC3B7; Tue, 23 Dec 2008 13:13:06 -0800 (PST) MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit From: Roland McGrath To: "Frank Ch. Eigler" Cc: Theodore Tso , systemtap@sources.redhat.com Subject: Re: Discussion at Linux Foundation Japan Symposium In-Reply-To: Frank Ch. Eigler's message of Monday, 22 December 2008 15:37:48 -0500 <20081222203747.GA4195@redhat.com> References: <20081221003831.GG24081@redhat.com> <20081222181921.GH23723@mit.edu> <20081222203747.GA4195@redhat.com> X-Zippy-Says: Actually, what I'd like is a little toy spaceship!! Message-Id: <20081223211306.67D29FC3B7@magilla.sf.frob.com> Date: Tue, 23 Dec 2008 22:21:00 -0000 X-Scanned-By: MIMEDefang 2.58 on 172.16.52.254 X-IsSubscribed: yes Mailing-List: contact systemtap-help@sourceware.org; run by ezmlm Precedence: bulk List-Id: List-Subscribe: List-Post: List-Help: , Sender: systemtap-owner@sourceware.org X-SW-Source: 2008-q4/txt/msg00635.txt.bz2 > > The process of getting userspace probes in will go slowly (if at > > all). I haven't seen a new version of the patches submitted in > > months --- and the 2.6.29 merge window will be opening soon. [...] > > Roland? Please advise. I've never had much facility for soap opera, so I'll ignore Ted's hyperbole about my personal ability to relate to the kernel community. I think my record of kernel contributions speaks for itself (for however good or ill you construe that record). But it's worth noting that of the 231 upstream commits since 2.6.24 that GIT attributes to me, only a handful are *not* part of the groundwork for utrace (or whatever it may become or be supplanted by). I believe the actual reasons for slow progress are far more mundane than any dramatic intercommunity conflicts or failures to address the kernel development culture. It's the variety of effects of having ~0.5 person ever work on the core enabling piece (utrace) that has to go in to enable other work. (And 0.5 of a bit of a scatterbrain, at that.) As I've seen it, there has been a great deal of hand-wringing and fret, and some amount of blame-seeking, but not a lot of straight-up collaborative hacking. I consider this an organizational failure of the project's community and the organizations supporting it, of which I'm a member and a party to that failure. I'll freely admit to being disappointed about that, but I don't see any point in dwelling on any past lacks--I'm sure I'm lousy at discussions hashing them over, and I'm sure I have no patience for them either. We simply have to work harder and more cohesively together to make progress now, and I think we all know what it takes to do that. Less yakin', more hackin'. We recently had a meeting (among several main systemtap contributors) on this. I did not then characterize the situation in such stark terms, but we discussed how to collaborate better on utrace and related code that we need to get in shape to go into the kernel. (Some notes from that meeting were posted on the utrace-devel@redhat.com mailing list, and I'm not sure if those were posted here too.) I can only hope that when we resume work in the new year, we'll have turned over a new leaf and see contributors driving hard and participating with gusto in every aspect of the kernel work we need. This will certainly be a test, as it comes in a context of less than 0.5 of my time allocated to kernel work in the coming period that will cover at least the next one or two kernel merge cycles. Progress on utrace has been regrettably slow this fall, and it will get even slower now without major collaboration. (It so happens this refocusing of my time is intended to jump-start the DWARF size reduction work. I won't deny this may well be "12-18 months out" for stable release deployments, but it can't even be that if it doesn't start sometime, and this is an approach to the debuginfo issues that most people other than Ted seem to agree could solve many important problems for systemtap.) Thanks and Happy Holidays, Roland