Re: PECI patchset status

[Patrick Williams <patrick@stwcx.xyz>]

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On Thu, Sep 03, 2020 at 10:15:56AM -0700, Vernon Mauery wrote:
> On 03-Sep-2020 10:27 AM, Patrick Williams wrote:
> >On Thu, Sep 03, 2020 at 05:57:48AM +0000, Mihm, James wrote:
> >Rather than create a separate fork of the kernel, is there something
> >that could be done here to have someone from Intel work with Joel on
> >preparing the patches?  When a new kernel comes out, Joel can ensure it
> >works on the base AST2xxx system design and before we move all the
> >systems to it, someone from Intel can rebase the non-upstreamed patches
> >they are carrying?  This hopefully reduces some of the burden on Joel
> >and stops us from further fragmenting the community.
> 
> Keep in mind that Intel does not plan to keep the fork around 
> indefinitely. The hope is to fully upstream all of the patches that we 
> have outstanding. Our intention is not to fragment the community, but to 
> provide a mechanism to continue to move forward while still providing a 
> way for other users to build the intel-platforms target.
> 
> As an added feature, having our full kernel source in a publicly 
> available tree will allow us to upstream more features that depend on 
> kernel support that is not currently available.

I'm not really following this last paragraph.  I suppose you're saying
that you have kernel changes that are not in openbmc/linux that add
additional features?  Why aren't they in openbmc/linux?  I thought there
was a process for getting code in that isn't quite ready for
upstreaming, as long as there is progress towards that?  Is there some
list of what these features are and what the upstreaming state is,
because this original thread was about PECI, but you're implying there
is much more.

If the process isn't working for the community shouldn't we discuss
improving that to something that does work?  It seems like your team has
decided to go to the nuclear option of forking after Joel has proposed
dropping a patchset that he's been carrying for three months short of
three years.

Joel does great work of keeping the kernel up to date, both on a major
release and picking up supplemental fixes.  Is Intel committing to this
same level of support that Joel is currently providing for your own
fork?

Past performance doesn't really give me a lot of confidence that this
will be a short-term fork.  In December 2019, Joel raised this exact
same problem with the PECI driver[1] and it was promised that there
would be forward progress "within a week"[2].  One week later, there was
a v11 of the patches posted[3] and we got some good comments from a
variety of upstream maintainers.  Since then, there has been zero
activity.  Shouldn't we have seen a v12 pretty quickly after that?

1. https://lists.ozlabs.org/pipermail/openbmc/2019-December/019684.html
2. https://lists.ozlabs.org/pipermail/openbmc/2019-December/019728.html
3. https://lists.ozlabs.org/pipermail/openbmc/2019-December/019823.html

-- 
Patrick Williams

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