[Ksummit-discuss] [CORE TOPIC] cleaning up kthread freezer hell, part 2
Jiri Kosina
jikos at kernel.org
Fri Jul 8 22:31:33 UTC 2016
On last year's kernel summit, I've been talking about why I consider
kthread freezer harmful and why it ultimately should be removed. LWN
coverage of that session is here:
https://lwn.net/Articles/662703/
During the past year, I've invested a bit of a time into actually looking
deeper into the dark corners of kernel sources to see how kthread freezer
is used throughout the codebase, with the intent to ultimately fix all the
buggy places. While doing that, I was petrified by two facts:
- there are a *lot* of places where kthread freezer is used in a
completely buggy (or useless) way
- one of the obstacles fixing it are maintainers who actually don't
understand the purpose of the kthread freezer (the usual pattern is that
the main kthread loop has been copy/pasted from different code, which
already used freezer, and so disease spreads)
Therefore I'd propose a v2 of the last year's session; first summarizing
the horrible experience I've done on this kthread freezer journey, and as
a followup, try to (re-)explain the issue and the way I think it should be
resolved.
The idea is to get as much coverage among high-profile maintainers as
possible, in a hope that this will result in ultimate tree-wide cleanup of
the current mess. That's why I propose this as a core topic rather than
tech topic, although it might sound like a rather bordeline one.
Thanks,
--
Jiri Kosina
SUSE Labs
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