Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1756899AbXJ3Rwi (ORCPT ); Tue, 30 Oct 2007 13:52:38 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S1752861AbXJ3Rwa (ORCPT ); Tue, 30 Oct 2007 13:52:30 -0400 Received: from smtp2.linux-foundation.org ([207.189.120.14]:52913 "EHLO smtp2.linux-foundation.org" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1752554AbXJ3Rw3 (ORCPT ); Tue, 30 Oct 2007 13:52:29 -0400 Date: Tue, 30 Oct 2007 10:50:23 -0700 (PDT) From: Linus Torvalds To: Mathieu Desnoyers cc: Jeff Garzik , Randy Dunlap , hch@infradead.org, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, Sam Ravnborg , Jens Axboe , Prasanna S Panchamukhi , Ananth N Mavinakayanahalli , Anil S Keshavamurthy , "David S. Miller" , Ingo Molnar , Peter Zijlstra , Philippe Elie , "William L. Irwin" , Arjan van de Ven , Christoph Lameter , Valdis.Kletnieks@vt.edu Subject: Re: [RFC] Create kinst/ or ki/ directory ? In-Reply-To: <20071030172442.GA4477@Krystal> Message-ID: References: <20071029215138.GA4233@Krystal> <20071029154741.cb093f55.rdunlap@xenotime.net> <4726649A.5020605@garzik.org> <20071029230409.GB16943@Krystal> <472667F3.3000505@garzik.org> <20071030172442.GA4477@Krystal> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=us-ascii Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Content-Length: 2135 Lines: 59 On Tue, 30 Oct 2007, Mathieu Desnoyers wrote: > > * Jeff Garzik (jeff@garzik.org) wrote: > ... > > Pick a shorter word like probes or profile or what... or better yet... > > just leave most things in their current directories. > ... > > > How about something along the > > kinst or ki > > lines ? > > (for "kernel instrumentation") No, that's horrible. Also, in general, why do people want to have an "instrumentation" thing? Yes, you can put random things into the same box, but that doesn't make them be the same thing. Personally, I don't think "instrumentation" is very useful at all. I consider "profiling" and "markers" to be two fundamentally different things, and putting them both in the same box does not make them any more similar. Yes, technically they are both "instrumentation", but hey, technically the VM and the VFS layer are both "infrastructure", but we don't put *those* in a "infrastructure" subdirectory. In other words, the fact that two different things share some attribute does not mean that they should be collapsed together by that attribute, does it? I think "instrumentation" was/is a particularly bad thing to group things by. It doesn't actually tell you anything about the thing, and it's not even true that some people are interested in "instrumentation" and others aren't. For example: I think profiling support is something REALLY FUNDAMENTAL. It's something each and every developer should generally care about, and OProfile should be considered an indispensable tool for any developer, on par with something like gdb. In contrast, we should *not* expect most people to do any kernel markers etc. That's a very esoteric thing. So I actually think that the current Kconfig.instrumentation should be *removed*. Rather than adding more groupings based on that fundamentally flawed premise of false commonality. Linus - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/