On Thu, Apr 27, 2006 at 11:32:45AM -0700, Stephen Williams wrote:

Eugene Surovegin wrote:

quoted

There are bigger problems with 4xx support in 2.4 mainline than just 
missing some chips support.

Some parts which are already in 2.4 (e.g. ethernet driver) are of 
non-production quality. 

I can imagine Marcelo agreeing to commit 405GPr/405EP support as this 
change shouldn't break anything, but this will not make 2.4 support 
really useful for real world deployments. I think we are stuck with 
maintaining our own 2.4 trees with backports from 2.6. This is what I 
do myself of all our products (and yeah, diff between stock 2.4.32 and 
my internal version has already grown quite big to be acceptable for 
2.4 inclusion).

Of course we are going to have to keep our own per-board trees.
but the blatantly common stuff, like the core 405gpr support and
certain drivers, might as well go in if the gatekeeper can be
convinced. You and I both probably have huge drivers for custom
devices hanging off our PPCs, with various hacks to squeeze extra
performance out. These make our transition to 2.6 difficult, and
surely we are not alone.

Well, personally, I don't migrate to 2.6 not because I have many custom 
drivers in my tree (if they are properly written, migration is 
relatively easy), but because 2.6 in my opinion isn't production 
ready, at least for architectures I work with. 2.6 is slower, bigger, 
is constantly being broken by huge amount of changes, etc. I spent 
enough time making 2.4 work on our hardware given limitations and 
requirements put on performance, resources etc. I just don't have time 
to go through this cycle again. And I'm not talking about PPC stuff, I 
mean mostly generic stuff - filesystems, scheduling, networking, etc.

So 2.4 is going to be around for a while longer for us, so we might
as well make an effort to keep the house in some sort of order. It
serves no one to keep these fixes a secret:-)

They aren't secret, but I can understand the simple fact that 2.4 is 
closed for a new stuff, we might not like that (although I do, just 
look at the mess "stable" 2.6 is :).

There is a point in every piece of software life-cycle when you have 
to stop adding features. 2.4 is already at this point, and we should 
accept that.

-- 
Eugene