On Tue, Oct 30, 2012 at 12:53:06AM -0400, Mark Lord wrote:

On 12-10-29 07:03 PM, Greg Kroah-Hartman wrote:

quoted

On Mon, Oct 29, 2012 at 07:00:54PM -0400, Mark Lord wrote:

quoted

There's something else very wrong when going from 3.4.9 to 3.4.16.
I've done it on two machines here, one the AMD-450 server (64-bit),
and the other my main notebook (Core2duo 32-bit-PAE).

Both systems feel much more sluggish than usual with 3.4.16 running.
Reverted them both back to earlier kernels (3.4.9, 3.4.4-PAE),
and the usual responsive feel has returned.

Vague, I know, but something bad happened in there somewhere.

That's too vague for me to do anything with, sorry.  Bisection would be
good if you can figure out how to measure this.

Well, I'd bet Donkeys to Daises that reverting the kernel/sched.c changes
will probably fix the responsiveness, but I haven't done that yet.
I've lost enough time already debugging the other issues.

This is more just an indication that perhaps -stable patches need better review
than they're getting.  Take the setup.c breakage: as soon as I pointed it out,
a few people jumped in with knowledge that it was broken, and that patches
existed to fix it.

There will always be bugs, fixing them quickly is the best that we can
do.

That kind of thing should be happening before a -stable release,
though I don't know how you would get the Right People to look
at this stuff then rather than after the fact.  Maybe a topic
for a future kernel summit or something.

I send patches to everyone involved, and there's a -rc period where
people are _supposed_ to test things out.  If you know of a better way
to get other people to test and review, please let me know, this is the
best that we have come up with so far.

thanks,

greg k-h