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Sender: Ingo Molnar <mingo.kernel.org@gmail.com>
Date:   Sat, 6 Mar 2021 13:54:37 +0100
From:   Ingo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org>
To:     Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>,
        Stephen Rothwell <sfr@canb.auug.org.au>,
        Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Cc:     Pavel Machek <pavel@ucw.cz>, Krzysztof Kozlowski <krzk@kernel.org>,
        Linux Kernel Mailing List <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>,
        Borislav Petkov <bp@alien8.de>,
        Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>,
        Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Subject: Re: A note on the 5.12-rc1 tag
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* Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> wrote:

> But I also can heartily just recommend that people who already _did_
> start on rc1 to rebase their current - hopefully not extensive - work.

Thanks for the heads-up - we just rebased about 50 commits in -tip to 
avoid this bug: our normal workflow is to jump on -rc1 once it's 
released and integrate pending development work that we normally don't 
apply during the merge window. So our special pattern of pent-up 
merging did bite us a little bit - but nothing particularly serious.

> I know I've ranted about rebasing for years, and it has huge 
> downsides, but the operation does exist because sometimes you just 
> need to fix serious errors. So _mindful_ rebasing, understanding why 
> it shouldn't be a normal thing, but doing it when something 
> exceptional happens - that's not wrong.

Yeah, and in this case not sending scarce-resource testers & bisecters 
into the middle of a file corruption bug is definitely the right thing 
to do.

Maybe -next could double check that none of the maintainer trees have 
an -rc1 base? Your note here was kind of low-key. :-)

And maybe there's some bisection helper annotation or hook-script that 
can be embedded in the kernel Git tree to avoid or at least warn about 
particularly nasty bugs?

Thanks,

	Ingo