more verbosely: we sometimes do "blind" reverts, if it's reasonably
established (or strongly suspected) that a revert makes a bug less
severe. We do this even if we dont fully understand the bug and its
effects and time runs out - on the assumption that we wont get worse
than the old code was.
but what i'd not really like to do are blind _non-revert_ changes. With
your suggested change we'd introduce a seemingly innocious but still
wholly new (and untested) memory setup layout on the most popular Linux
kernel memory config in existence. (!PAE 32-bit is still being run on
more than 50% of the Linux desktops - around 80% runs 32-bit kernels.)
And as this bug demonstrates it, seemingly small differences appear to
have large effects so we cannot know in what direction that would go -
we might turn a rare regression into a common regression. I'd rather
release with this bug being unfixed than with tweaking it just because
the effect seems less severe on a totally unrepresentative set of
systems.
Ingo
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