RE: [RFC PATCH v6 00/12] cxl: Add support for CXL feature commands, CXL device patrol scrub control and DDR5 ECS control features

[Shiju Jose <shiju.jose@huawei.com>]

Hi Dan,

Thanks for the feedback.

Please find reply inline.

>-----Original Message-----
>From: Dan Williams <dan.j.williams@intel.com>
>Sent: 22 February 2024 00:21
>To: Shiju Jose <shiju.jose@huawei.com>; linux-cxl@vger.kernel.org; linux-
>acpi@vger.kernel.org; linux-mm@kvack.org; dan.j.williams@intel.com;
>dave@stgolabs.net; Jonathan Cameron <jonathan.cameron@huawei.com>;
>dave.jiang@intel.com; alison.schofield@intel.com; vishal.l.verma@intel.com;
>ira.weiny@intel.com
>Cc: linux-edac@vger.kernel.org; linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org;
>david@redhat.com; Vilas.Sridharan@amd.com; leo.duran@amd.com;
>Yazen.Ghannam@amd.com; rientjes@google.com; jiaqiyan@google.com;
>tony.luck@intel.com; Jon.Grimm@amd.com; dave.hansen@linux.intel.com;
>rafael@kernel.org; lenb@kernel.org; naoya.horiguchi@nec.com;
>james.morse@arm.com; jthoughton@google.com; somasundaram.a@hpe.com;
>erdemaktas@google.com; pgonda@google.com; duenwen@google.com;
>mike.malvestuto@intel.com; gthelen@google.com;
>wschwartz@amperecomputing.com; dferguson@amperecomputing.com;
>tanxiaofei <tanxiaofei@huawei.com>; Zengtao (B) <prime.zeng@hisilicon.com>;
>kangkang.shen@futurewei.com; wanghuiqiang <wanghuiqiang@huawei.com>;
>Linuxarm <linuxarm@huawei.com>; Shiju Jose <shiju.jose@huawei.com>
>Subject: RE: [RFC PATCH v6 00/12] cxl: Add support for CXL feature commands,
>CXL device patrol scrub control and DDR5 ECS control features
>
>shiju.jose@ wrote:
>> From: Shiju Jose <shiju.jose@huawei.com>
>>
>> 1. Add support for CXL feature mailbox commands.
>> 2. Add CXL device scrub driver supporting patrol scrub control and ECS
>> control features.
>> 3. Add scrub subsystem driver supports configuring memory scrubs in the
>system.
>> 4. Register CXL device patrol scrub and ECS with scrub subsystem.
>> 5. Add common library for RASF and RAS2 PCC interfaces.
>> 6. Add driver for ACPI RAS2 feature table (RAS2).
>> 7. Add memory RAS2 driver and register with scrub subsystem.
>
>I stepped away from this patch set to focus on the changes that landed for v6.8
>and the follow-on regression fixups. Now that v6.8 CXL work has quieted down
>and I circle back to this set for v6.9 I find the lack of story in this cover letter to
>be unsettling. As a reviewer I should not have to put together the story on why
>Linux should care about this feature and independently build up the
>maintainence-burden vs benefit tradeoff analysis.
I will add more details to the cover letter.
 
>
>Maybe it is self evident to others, but for me there is little in these changelogs
>besides "mechanism exists, enable it". There are plenty of platform or device
>mechanisms that get specified that Linux does not enable for one reason or
>another.
>
>The cover letter needs to answer why it matters, and what are the tradeoffs.
>Mind you, in my submissions I do not always get this right in the cover letter [1],
>but hopefully at least one of the patches tells the story [2].
>
>In other words, imagine you are writing the pull request to Linus or someone
>else with limited time who needs to make a risk decision on a pull request with a
>diffstat of:
>
>    23 files changed, 3083 insertions(+)
>
>...where the easiest decision is to just decline. As is, these changelogs are not
>close to tipping the scale to "accept".
>
>[sidebar: how did this manage to implement a new subsystem with 2 consumers
>(CXL + ACPI), without modifying a single existing line? Zero deletions? That is
>either an indication that Linux perfectly anticipated this future use case
>(unlikely), or more work needs to be done to digest an integrate these concepts
>into existing code paths]
>
>One of the first questions for me is why CXL and RAS2 as the first consumers and
>not NVDIMM-ARS and/or RASF Patrol Scrub? Part of the maintenance burden
We don't personally care about NVDIMMS but would welcome drivers from others.

Regarding RASF patrol scrub no one cared about it as it's useless and
any new implementation should be RAS2.
Previous discussions in the community about RASF and scrub could be find here.
https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20230915172818.761-1-shiju.jose@huawei.com/#r
and some old ones,
https://patchwork.kernel.org/project/linux-arm-kernel/patch/CS1PR84MB0038718F49DBC0FF03919E1184390@CS1PR84MB0038.NAMPRD84.PROD.OUTLOOK.COM/

https://lore.kernel.org/all/20221103155029.2451105-1-jiaqiyan@google.com/

>tradeoff is providing a migration path for legacy on the way to adding the new
>thing. If old scrub implementations could be deprecated / deleted on the way to
>supporting new scrub use cases that becomes interesting.
>
>[1]: http://lore.kernel.org/r/20240208220909.GA975234@bhelgaas
>[2]: http://lore.kernel.org/r/20240208221305.GA975512@bhelgaas

Thanks,
Shiju