On Fri 08-10-21 07:14:58, Dave Hansen wrote:

On 10/7/21 11:34 PM, Michal Hocko wrote:

quoted

quoted

Yes, please. It really seems like the folks that are interested in this
feature want strings. (I certainly do.)

I am sorry but there were no strong arguments mentioned for strings so
far.

The folks who want this have maintained an out-of-tree patch using
strings.  They've maintained it for the better part of a decade.  I
don't know how widely this shipped in the Android ecosystem, but I
suspect we're talking about billions of devices.  Right?

This is a feature that, if accepted into mainline, will get enabled and
used on billions of devices.  If we dumb this down to integers, it's not
100% clear that it _will_ get used.

That's a pretty strong argument in my book, even if the contributors
have difficulty articulating exactly why they want strings.

I would agree that if integers would make this unusable then this would
be a strong argument. But I haven't really heard any arguments like that
so far. I have heard about IPC overhead and other speculations that do
not seem really convincing. We shouldn't hand wave concerns regarding
the implementation complexity and resource handling just by "somebody
has been using this for decates", right?

Do not get me wrong. This is going to become a user interface and we
will have to maintain it for ever. As such an extra scrutiny has to be
applied.
-- 
Michal Hocko
SUSE Labs