FESCo Meeting Summary for 20090424

[Matthew Garrett]

On Sun, May 03, 2009 at 12:07:43PM -0500, Callum Lerwick wrote:
> On Fri, 2009-05-01 at 00:48 +0100, Matthew Garrett wrote:
> > The problem with the desktop is that it's obvious, looks simple and 
> > everyone has an opinion on it. But not all of these opinions are equally 
> > valid. This kind of situation is much easier to deal with in, say, the 
> > kernel VM system - in that case it would be perfectly acceptable for 
> > people who spend their entire working lives concentrating on a specific 
> > topic to say that they know better than people who occasionally touch 
> > upon it.
> 
> ... And the kernel VM people tend to be able to back up their expertise
> with hard data. If a patch isn't an improvement in some provable manner,
> it doesn't get in to the kernel.

Like everything else, kernel VM performance is a tradeoff. Improvements 
may benefit certain workloads while impairing others. It's rare for 
changes to improve things for everybody - so the end result is a 
judgement call, generally by the people who are assumed to know what 
they're doing.

-- 
Matthew Garrett | mjg59 at srcf.ucam.org