Re: [TUHS] First Unix-like OSes not derived from AT&T code?

[Warner Losh <imp@bsdimp.com>]

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On Mon, May 2, 2022 at 9:41 AM Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com> wrote:

>
>
> On Mon, May 2, 2022 at 10:46 AM tytso <tytso@mit.edu> wrote:
>
>> So it appears that it was not a
>> matter of "the upstream Linux kernel team.... [being] willing to take
>> the VPROC changes", it was more like no one asked, or prepared patches
>> that could be considered by usptream.
>>
> FWIW:  I know that at least 3 people on the OpenSSI team were telling me
> they were told to go away.   I do not know the details of the interchange,
> but doing some Linux work at the time, I too found the reception to kernel
> changes to often be a tad cold (it took 10 years to get the core RDMA
> support up-streamed). It's possible the way the OpenSSI team asked, the
> prayers offered were not acceptable to those in charge at the time.  I
> don't know, but please be careful here. *They were tried and feel
> that they were rejected.*   *That is history*.  I understand that you
> want to try to say, well there is no evidence of the proper emails/git
> change, *etc.*   But that team ran into blocks.  So you can be a lawyer
> about it, or you can try to accept what actually happened to those of us on
> the other end with some grace.
>

I know from wearing my FreeBSD hat that random people on mailing lists
often say 'nope' and people go away not realizing they aren't the abitors
of what gets into FreeBSD. We lost a lot of good contributions because of
delays created by scenarios like this...

I also know that getting changes into Linux suffers from this and for a
long time (especially pre-git) was almost impossible unless you knew
someone and were on good terms with them.

Also, people will get frustrated after one or two things don't go up and
they don't do the rest. Or they do one big huge thing that's impossible to
review (maybe it went to the wrong place) and they give up too unless
there's an 'advocate' that works with them to make the changes bite-sized
and sorts out the wheat from the chaff that's almost always in huge change
sets. The process that was documented was hit or miss. Plus lkm wasn't the
nicest of places with the best of interactions, which put off a lot of
people from even trying... Much has been done to improve things in the last
20 years, but for a while things were truly awful for someone without a
huge reputation to get anything non-trivial into Linux. Even today,
projects following the Linux model can be difficult to land changes in,
even when you are nominally the maintainer of a part of the tree...

VPROC was done for 2.6, which is long enough ago to be in the 'bad old
days' of getting things upstreamed.

It wouldn't surprise me at all that enough things were done wrong, and/or
they listened to the wrong people and/or submitted things in the wrong
place they the OpenSSI folks just gave up in frustration early on w/o
getting the right people's attention...

Warner

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