Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S965548Ab2EPUEo (ORCPT ); Wed, 16 May 2012 16:04:44 -0400 Received: from mail-we0-f174.google.com ([74.125.82.174]:58913 "EHLO mail-we0-f174.google.com" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1760081Ab2EPUEn (ORCPT ); Wed, 16 May 2012 16:04:43 -0400 MIME-Version: 1.0 In-Reply-To: <1337198404.6724.81.camel@gandalf.stny.rr.com> References: <1337175871.6724.46.camel@gandalf.stny.rr.com> <1337198404.6724.81.camel@gandalf.stny.rr.com> From: Linus Torvalds Date: Wed, 16 May 2012 13:04:22 -0700 X-Google-Sender-Auth: rRcLTpGZrxEGOljUWf3qR5dKop4 Message-ID: Subject: Re: [RFC][PATCH] tracing: Remove useless 4 bytes of padding from every event To: Steven Rostedt Cc: LKML , Arjan van de Ven , Ingo Molnar , Frederic Weisbecker , David Sharp , Vaibhav Nagarnaik , Peter Zijlstra , Andrew Morton Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Content-Length: 1258 Lines: 27 On Wed, May 16, 2012 at 1:00 PM, Steven Rostedt wrote: > > Seriously though. What's your take on changing the kernel that will > break an older distro. Obviously, this change is too early to apply. But > because an old distro has one app that will break if we make a change in > the kernel, is that enough to keep that change out? I suspect that powertop is enough of a developer thing that if that's the only thing that breaks, we don't have to worry too much. I don't want to break *everybody*, so new distro's should be up-to-date. But breaking something like a F14-15 timeframe distro or something staid like a SLES (or "Debian Stale" or whatever they call that thing that only takes crazy-old binaries)? It's fine. We don't want to *rush* into it, but no, if those distros are basically not updating, we can't care about them forever for something like powertop. Things that break *normal* applications are different. There the rule really must be "never". 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/