Let it just be noted that Con is not the only one who has expended effort
on this patch. It's been in -mm for nearly two years and it has meant
ongoing effort for me and, to a lesser extent, other MM developers to keep
it alive.
Critera are different for each patch, but it usually comes down to a
cost/benefit judgement. Does the benefit of the patch exceed its
maintenance cost over the lifetime of the kernel (whatever that is).
In this case the answer to that has never been clear to me. The (much
older) fs-aio patches were (are) in a similar situation.
The other consideration here is, as Nick points out, are the problems which
people see this patch solving for them solveable in other, better ways?
IOW, is this patch fixing up preexisting deficiencies post-facto?
To attack the second question we could start out with bug reports: system A
with workload B produces result C. I think result C is wrong for <reasons>
and would prefer to see result D.
Well. The above, plus there's always a lot of stuff happening in MM land,
and I haven't seen much in the way of enthusiasm from the usual MM
developers.
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