Vivek, perhaps a little more context about the background of the changes would have helped here. Not everyone has been following the details of fastboot/kdump discussion for the last few months.
Let me give this a try - Eric/Vivek please pitch in and correct me, where I go wrong since even I haven't been that tightly plugged in all the time. Sometime back kexec underwent a major redesign in some respect. This was mainly in terms of the division of responsibilities between the kernel and user-space kexec-tools. For kdump in particular this also had to do with the real groundwork being set for better integration into kexec mainstream, and a more reliable and cleaner interface between what happens in kexec-tools, in the old kernel's context and in the new kernel's context. On the whole, a better world for all :) However, at that time, when this new revamped kexec was integrated into -mm, the corresponding kdump redesign was still pending -- which is why the *old* crash dump patches in -mm were kind of irrelevant and broken because they hadn't caught up with the kexec revamp. Which is also why kdump wasn't being tested on -mm ... it didn't even work ! Sorting this all out is really what I see Vivek's latest patches being intended for -- and I believe it is the outcome of the work that has been happening on fastboot over the last several months ? This is why, I guess, it made sense for him to take the route of throwing out most of the old patches and starting afresh with new ones, because these are *built* on a different foundation altogether, so incremental patches would have been rather confusing. This should not be a continuing trend from here on (I hope not at least, since major revamps are quite costly on stability !), so shouldn't be a cause for worry. The bullet has been bitten. From here on, changes must be incremental. Regards Suparna On Tue, Mar 29, 2005 at 10:29:13AM +0530, Vivek Goyal wrote: > On Mon, 2005-03-28 at 17:48 -0800, Andrew Morton wrote: > > Vivek Goyal <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > > > > Following patches (as in series file) need to be dropped before applying > > > the fresh ones. > > > > > > crashdump-documentation.patch > > > crashdump-memory-preserving-reboot-using-kexec.patch > > > crashdump-routines-for-copying-dump-pages.patch > > > crashdump-routines-for-copying-dump-pages-fixes.patch > > > crashdump-elf-format-dump-file-access.patch > > > crashdump-linear-raw-format-dump-file-access.patch > > > crashdump-linear-raw-format-dump-file-access-coding-style.patch > > > > At some point we should stop tossing out patches and replacing them in this > > manner. > > > Andrew, I shall take care of sending incremental patches only next time > onwards. The reason why I did this because changes were relatively large > and I thought dropping the existing series and replacing it with new > series (some patches retaining the old name) might be a better idea. > > > > Because doing so makes it hard for people to see what has changed. > > > > It makes it hard for people to see that changes in the above patches > > haven't been simply lost. > > > > And the fact that you were probably working against some kernel other than > > -mm gives little confidence that the kdump development team have been > > testing the patches which are presently in -mm. And that is what they are > > there for. > > > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > fastboot mailing list > [EMAIL PROTECTED] > http://lists.osdl.org/mailman/listinfo/fastboot -- Suparna Bhattacharya ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) Linux Technology Center IBM Software Lab, India - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
