From owner-freebsd-current Mon Aug 27 12:43:30 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-current@freebsd.org Received: from earth.backplane.com (earth-nat-cw.backplane.com [208.161.114.67]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id CC52C37B401; Mon, 27 Aug 2001 12:43:27 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from dillon@earth.backplane.com) Received: (from dillon@localhost) by earth.backplane.com (8.11.6/8.11.2) id f7RJhRr24275; Mon, 27 Aug 2001 12:43:27 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from dillon) Date: Mon, 27 Aug 2001 12:43:27 -0700 (PDT) From: Matt Dillon Message-Id: <200108271943.f7RJhRr24275@earth.backplane.com> To: Robert Watson Cc: John Baldwin , Julian Elischer , current@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: RE: Headsup! KSE Nay-sayers speak up! References: Sender: owner-freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG Sheesh. Everyone is so negative! Well, I'm going to be too. I think compared to some of the other things that have been thrown into -current, the KSE stuff will be the LEAST disruptive. Don't go bashing Julian for coming up with a reasoned approach to adding them, discussing the concept at many meetings (including at USENIX), and doing all the hard work to get it done. He's done a hellof a lot more discussion and worked with people a lot more any other feature that has been thrown into -current. He doesn't deserve these kind of responses, not after all the work that's been done. He's been talking about this for 2 years. TWO years! - Just for myself, I am seriously considering just throwing the whole lot (-current, that is) away and starting over from -stable. I spent 20 hours last weekend trying to unwind even part of the VM system from Giant, and failed utterly. I'd love to see the KSE stuff in -stable, I think it might even be a better fit. I am seriously considering this because I think we made a huge mistake throwing away the spl*() mechanism in -current, as a means of getting out from under the Giant lock paradigm quickly and partitioning the problem in a manner that allows subsystems to be worked on independantly. And I don't see any way to get it back. The spl*() mechanism already partitions the major subsystems that *need* to operate concurrently: I/O, interrupts, and the network stack. We would be able to work on major subsystems independantly and we would be able to debug things much more easily. -current as it currently stands is very nearly undebuggable. I've been thinking about this for the last few months... I am still thinking about it. I haven't made a decision yet. I think if KSEs go into -current I would stick with it, but if KSEs do not go into -current I don't see much of a point, -current will have wholely gone off in a direction that I don't believe in (rather then just mostly gone off). -Matt To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message