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    SubjectRe: [PATCH 9/11] Panic delay fix
    Pavel Machek wrote:
    > On Thu 2007-02-08 07:36:12, Rusty Russell wrote:
    >
    >> On Wed, 2007-02-07 at 12:35 +0000, Pavel Machek wrote:
    >>
    >>> Ugh, it sounds like paravirt is more b0rken then I thought. It should
    >>> always to the proper delay, then replace those udelays that are not
    >>> needed on virtualized hardware with something else.
    >>>
    >>> Just magically defining udelay into nop is broken.
    >>>
    >> We'd have to audit and figure out what udelays are for hardware and
    >> which are not, but the evidence is that the vast majority of them are
    >> for hardware and not needed for virtualization.
    >>
    >
    > You did not time to do the full audit, so you just did #define.
    >

    Yes, of course. Since 99% of the drivers are completely irrelevant for
    paravirt, and 99% of the udelays are in drivers, there isn't much point
    to auditing a bunch of code we're not even going to be affected by. The
    default case for udelay is it is not needed.


    >> Changing udelay to "hardware_udelay" or something all over the kernel
    >> would have delayed the paravirt_ops merge by an infinite amount 8)
    >>
    >
    > And here you claim you could not do the right thing, because people
    > would notice you are doing huge search/replace without audit, and
    > would stop you. So you simply hidden it from them :-(.
    >

    What ludicrousness is this? Hidden what? That the default case for
    udelay is that it is not needed?

    > Plus... udelay() should just work under virtualization, right? You get
    > slightly slower kernel, but still working, so the "full audit" is not
    > as hard as you are telling me.
    >

    Save the time of doing a useless full audit and making sure we didn't
    accidentally redefine or misspell some symbol on a bunch of
    architectures we aren't even set up to compile for.

    > Just replace udelay() with hardware_udelay() on places that matter in
    > your workload...
    >

    That's inconsistent. We would be doing 2 SCSI drivers, part of the IDE
    code, some i386 arch code, some random places in the kernel... and now
    nobody else knows whether to use udelay or hardware_udelay and the code
    gets jumbled to the point that it is useless because there is no clear
    distinction between the two. It is non-trivial to come up with a list
    of source files that we have to actually do this to. One C-file calls a
    shared routine in a library, and now you've got a hidden udelay that you
    have absolutely no way of detecting. The right thing to do if you want
    to do it on a line by line basis is exactly the opposite. Remove udelay
    and find out what breaks. Bugs are easier to find and fix than hidden
    code. If I were to do it on a line by line basis, I would chose to
    replace udelay() with real_time_udelay() for those places that actually
    need it.

    Zach
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