Schedule for releases

[Garrett Cooper]

On Dec 22, 2010, at 12:57 PM, Robert Watson <rwatson at FreeBSD.org> wrote:

> 
> On Wed, 22 Dec 2010, Mike Karels wrote:
> 
>> - We sometimes back-port other changes, such as TCP locking fixes that help performance.  Considering some such things for MFC would be desirable.
> 
> Just to comment on the specifics of this one: over the cource of 6.x, 7.x, and 8.x, I non-trivially improved locking in the TCP/UDP code.  Some of those changes could be backported -- others couldn't be.  Part of the reason I didn't merge some changes was our increasing attempt to provide stable KPIs and KBIs for kernel modules, especially as TCP offload support in device drivers became a reality.
> 
> We're now going to hit the same issue in 9.x: I'm about to commit significant network stack locking and work distribution changes to improve TCP and UDP scalability, leading to multiplied performance on parallel systems.  As of the interpretation of KPI/KBI compatibility we have today, these cannot be MFC'd to 8.x.  I think there's a motivation to revisit our thinking on KPI/KBI so that we can merge them to 8.x in the future; I'll say more about this on the net@ mailing list in a month or so once the changes are in 9.x and have shaken out a bit.

Even though the network stack is relatively stable, I've run in to problems backporting CPU identification fixes and filesystem fixes in 6.x and 7.x s.t. I gave up because of the other dependent changes I had to pull in. Ran into a similar issue with mfiutil/mfi. So it would be nice if things didn't change so much between minor versions.

Thanks,
-Garrett