Date: Wed, 29 Mar 2006 21:03:14 -0800
From: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
To: Shailabh Nagar <nagar@watson.ibm.com>
Cc: greg@kroah.com, arjan@infradead.org, hadi@cyberus.ca, ak@suse.de,
       linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, lse-tech@lists.sourceforge.net
Subject: Re: [Patch 0/8] per-task delay accounting
Message-Id: <20060329210314.3db53aaa.akpm@osdl.org>
In-Reply-To: <442B271D.10208@watson.ibm.com>
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Shailabh Nagar <nagar@watson.ibm.com> wrote:
>
> Could you please include the following delay accounting patches
>  in -mm ?

I'm at a loss to evaluate the suitability of this work, really.  I always
am when accounting patches come along.

There are various people and various groups working on various different
things and there appears to be no coordination and little commonality of
aims.  I worry that picking one submission basically at random will provide
nothing which the other groups can work on to build up their feature.

On the other hand, we don't want to do nothing until some uber-grand
all-singing, all-dancing statistics-gathering infrastructure comes along.

So I'm a bit stuck.  What I would like to see happen is that there be some
coordination between the various stakeholders, and some vague plan which
they're all happy with as a basis for the eventual grand solution.

We already have various bits and pieces of statistics gathering in the
kernel and it's already a bit ad-hoc.  Adding more one-requirement-specific
accounting code won't improve that situation.

But then, I said all this a year or two ago and nothing much has happened
since then.  It's not your fault, but it's a problem.

Perhaps a good starting point would be a one-page bullet-point-form
wishlist of all the accounting which people want to get out of the kernel,
and a description of what the kernel<->user interface should look like. 
Right now, I don't think we even have a picture of that.

We need a statistics maintainer, too, to pull together the plan,
coordinate, push things forwards.  The first step would be to identify the
stakeholders, come up with that page of bullet-points.

Then again, maybe the right thing to do is to keep adding low-impact
requirement-specific statistics patches as they come along.  But if we're
going to do it that way, we need an up-front reason for doing so, and I
don't know what that would be.

See my problem?
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