Re: [Cake] [Bloat] Two questions re high speed congestionmanagement anddatagram protocols

["Toke Høiland-Jørgensen" <toke@toke.dk>]

"David P. Reed via Bloat" <bloat@lists.bufferbloat.net> writes:

> (One such nightmare can be seen in LKML... Search for
> dpreed@deepplum.com patch emails. I tried hard, was worn down, then
> gave up, since I found a way to avoid the bug, in virtualization code
> on x86, and gave up on getting it fixed after a year. Life is too
> short.

Went looking, since I think it's important to learn from such process
failures (and you're certainly not the first to opine that getting
patches into the kernel is challenging).

I'm assuming you're referring to this series, right?

https://lore.kernel.org/all/20200704203809.76391-4-dpreed@deepplum.com/

Which, to me, looks like it was pretty close to being accepted; another
revision would probably have made the cut...

...In fact it seems those patches were later resurrected by Sean as part
of this series, six months later:

https://lore.kernel.org/all/20201231002702.2223707-1-seanjc@google.com/

One of the patches retained your authorship and made it into the kernel
in this commit:

https://git.kernel.org/torvalds/c/53666664a305


So wouldn't necessarily call that a complete failure :) Seems the main
process issue you hit here was a subsystem that was too resource
constrained on the review side, which does sadly happen. The kernel
process tends to heavily favour convenience of reviewers for the same
reason (which is one of the reasons it can be off-putting to outsiders,
so it's a bit of a chicken and egg situation...)

-Toke