Here is the story from Slashdot IT:

  oDDmON oUT writes “An article on the Computerworld site quotes polling results from a potentially-divisive PatchLink survey. The poll shows that the majority of enterprise customers feel there are no compelling security enhancements in Windows Vista, that they have no plans to migrate to it in the near term and that many will ‘either stick with the Windows they have, or turn to Linux or Mac OS X’. A majority, 87%, said they would stay with their existing version of Windows. This comes on the heels of a dissenting view of Vista’s track record in the area of security at the six month mark, which sparked a heated discussion on numerous forums.”

Here is the full story:

Businesses having second thoughts about Vista

Fewer now believe it’s more secure than XP, says new survey

July 30, 2007 (Computerworld) — Fewer businesses are now planning to move to Windows Vista than seven months ago, according to a survey by patch management vendor PatchLink Corp., while more said they will either stick with the Windows they have, or turn to Linux or Mac OS X.

In a just-released poll of more than 250 of its clients, PatchLink noted that only 2% said they are already running Vista, while another 9% said they planned to roll out Vista in the next three months. A landslide majority, 87%, said they would stay with their existing version(s) of Windows.

Those numbers contrasted with a similar survey the Scottsdale, Ariz.-based vendor published in December 2006. At the time, 43% said they had plans to move to Vista while just 53% planned to keep what Windows they had.

Today’s hesitation also runs counter to what companies thought they would do as of late last year. In PatchLink’s December poll, 28% said they would deploy Vista within the first year of its release. But by the results of the latest survey, fewer than half as many — just 11% — will have opted for the next-generation operating system by Nov. 1.

Their change of heart may be because of a changed perception of Vista’s security skills. Seven months ago — within weeks of Vista’s official launch to business, but before the operating system started selling in retail — 50% of the CIOs, CSOs, IT and network administrators surveyed by PatchLink said they believe Vista to be more secure than Windows XP. The poll put the security skeptical at 15% and pegged those who weren’t sure yet at 35%.

Today, said PatchLink, only 28% agreed that Vista is more secure than XP. Meanwhile, the no votes increased to 24% and the unsure climbed to 49%.

Reconsiderations about Vista have given rival operating systems a second chance at breaking into corporations. Last year, Linux and Max OS X had only meager appeal to the CIOs, CSOs, IT and network administrators surveyed: 2% said they planned to deploy the open-source Linux, while none owned up to Mac OS X plans. July’s survey, however, noted a six-fold increase in the total willing to do without Windows on at least some systems: 8% of those polled acknowledged Linux plans and 4% said they would deploy Mac OS X.

PatchLink’s survey results fit with research firms’ continued forecasts that corporate deployment of Vista won’t seriously begin until early next year.

Although Microsoft recently announced it had shipped 60 million copies of Vista so far, it has declined to specify how many buyers are businesses, or even what percentage of the estimated 42 million PCs covered by corporate license agreements have actually upgraded to Vista.

The poll also offered evidence that corporations are even more afraid of zero-day vulnerabilities — bugs still unpatched when they’re made public or used in exploits — than they were last year.

Zero-day vulnerabilities are the top security concern for the majority of IT professionals, according to the survey, with 53% of those polled ranking it as a major worry. In the December 2006 survey, only 29% of the administrators pegged zero-days as their top problem.

“The prospect of zero-day attacks is extremely troubling for organizations of all sizes,” said Charles Kolodgy, an IDC research director, in a statement accompanying the survey. “Today’s financially motivated attackers are creating customized, sophisticated malware designed to exploit unpublished application vulnerabilities in specific applications before they can be fixed.”

This is a good story, I think.

Ryan Orser

Well here is something that it seems to go on and on. Slashdot’s story of Microsoft FUD Watch:

rs232 writes “Not a week goes by when Microsoft doesn’t manufacture a little fear, uncertainty and doubt about something. Yesterday’s financial analyst conference was full of it … Our approach is simple: We look at who said what and why it’s FUD. Lots of companies engage in FUD, and we only single out Microsoft because we’re Microsoft Watch”

 Here is the Story on eweek Microsoft Watch:

Microsoft FUD Watch, 6-27-07

 

 Not a week goes by when Microsoft doesn’t manufacture a little fear, uncertainty and doubt about something. Yesterday’s financial analyst conference was full of it.

FUD Watch will be an ongoing addition to our blogging, this time delivered in simple post format. Some future FUD Watch updates could come in podcast or slide show format.

Our approach is simple: We look at who said what and why it’s FUD. Lots of companies engage in FUD, and we only single out Microsoft because we’re Microsoft Watch.

Ray Ozzie, chief software architect

What he said:

“We are the only company in the industry that has the breadth of reach from consumer to enterprises to understand and deliver and to take full advantage of the services opportunity in all of these markets. I believe we’re the only company with the platform DNA that’s necessarily to viably deliver this highly leveragable platform approach to services. And we’re certainly one of the few companies that has the financial capacity to capitalize on this sea change, this services transformation.”

Why is it FUD?
Ozzie spoke about Microsoft’s services strategy at last year’s financial analysts conference, too. Talk, talk, talk. Promises, promises. Microsoft hasn’t yet delivered one piece of its so-called services strategy. The boasting, coupled with yesterday’s presentation on the services framework, is a good way of making Microsoft out to be doing much more than it really is; right now that’s not much, because nothing new is on the market. Meanwhile, Google continues to make huge advertising and search gains. Microsoft is notorious for talking about what it’s going to do some day. Hey, what about today?

Robbie Bach, president, Entertainment & Devices division

What he said:

“What we find in the phone market is that people do want choice, because they use their phone for different things. Some people want an entertainment phone. Some people want a text-messaging e-mail phone. Some people want a phone where it’s easy to dial. People want different sets of capabilities, and a bunch of people want a full QWERTY keyboard. And so we have to be able to provide the operating system to the operators and to the handset manufacturers that delivers that diversity.”

Why is it FUD?
“Choice” is a code word for “choice, as long as it’s on a Microsoft platform.” When iPod sales started to skyrocket, Microsoft responded with a FUD campaign about choice—how many different devices and music services used Windows Media technologies. Microsoft clearly is cueing up for a choice FUD campaign against the iPhone. Regarding the iPhone, Microsoft delivers a two-FUD punch about choice and cost, dismissing, as CEO Steve Ballmer has done, the iPhone because of its $500 or $600 price.

Number of choices isn’t the same as what you choose. Remember those old Starkist commercials with Charlie the Tuna, where he had good taste but that didn’t mean he would taste good? Choices aren’t necessarily the same as choice. Tens of millions of people chose the iPod. In mobiles, the majority already has made its choice: Symbian OS-based cell phones. That said, lots of U.S. folks have chosen the iPhone—270,000 units in the first two days of sales.

Jeff Raikes, president, Business division

What he said:

“Historically, our [Enterprise Agreement] renewal rates have been about 2/3 to 3/4. And I know many of you wonder, well, with customers already licensed for the 2007 Office system, were they going to renew their Enterprise Agreement? We were very, very excited to see that because of the strength of our road map, the future that they see in what we’re investing in the Office system, the rate was greater than 90 percent in this last quarter.”

Why is it FUD?
Analysts from Forrester and Gartner have Microsoft customer data indicating sluggish Software Assurance renewals. Microsoft hasn’t publicly commented on SA renewals. The very positive Enterprise Agreement data is a misdirection. It draws attention to an exciting trend that suggests volume licensing contract renewals are rosy. But strong EA renewals don’t necessarily mean a similar trend for Software Assurance. Can you say non sequitur?

Kevin Turner, chief operating officer

What he said:

“By our math we eclipse the entire install base of Apple in the first five weeks that this product shipped. And that’s something again—this ecosystem that I just talked about—we’re not building an ecosystem that handles four, five, six devices and five or six printers. The opportunity is 2.1 million devices and thousands and thousands of printers. And that’s the importance of getting this product to mass and scale, which we believe is a huge competitive advantage for us.”

Why is it FUD?
Apple announced record earnings the day before Turner made this statement. The company shipped a record number of Macs with year-over-year unit growth of 20 percent and 42 percent, respectively, for desktops and notebooks. Microsoft’s estimate for second-calendar-quarter PC shipment growth, which is in line with those analyst projections, was between 11 and 13 percent; Mac shipments far exceed market growth.

Microsoft appears concerned about Apple, which brand is resurgent and which has made huge strides in some areas of entertainment and communications; however, Mac OS poses no immediate threat to Windows.

As for Turner’s ding: Wal-Mart typically takes in as much money in the first quarter as Target makes in one year. Is that a reason to pick one store over the other?

Thats what we should all be doing: Watching Microsoft!

here is a story on Slashdot:

  Firedog writes “There’s been a lot of recent debate over why Linus Torvalds chose the new CFS process scheduler written by Ingo Molnar over the SD process scheduler written by Con Kolivas, ranging from discussing the quality of the code to favoritism and outright conspiracy theories. KernelTrap is now reporting Linus Torvalds’ official stance as to why he chose the code that he did. ‘People who think SD was “perfect” were simply ignoring reality,’ Linus is quoted as saying. He goes on to explain that he selected the Completely Fair Scheduler because it had a maintainer who has proven himself willing and able to address problems as they are discovered. In the end, the relevance to normal Linux users is twofold: one is the question as to whether or not the Linux development model is working, and the other is the question as to whether the recently released 2.6.23 kernel will deliver an improved desktop experience.”

Here is the story on the Kernel Trap:

Linux: Linus On CFS vs SD

July 27, 2007 – 8:10pm

Submitted by Jeremy on July 27, 2007 – 8:10pm.

“People who think SD was ‘perfect’ were simply ignoring reality,” Linus Torvalds began in a succinct explanation as to why he chose the CFS scheduler written by Ingo Molnar instead of the SD scheduler written by Con Kolivas. He continued, “sadly, that seemed to include Con too, which was one of the main reasons that I never [entertained] the notion of merging SD for very long at all: Con ended up arguing against people who reported problems, rather than trying to work with them.” He went on to stress the importance of working toward a solution that is good for everyone, “that was where the SD patches fell down. They didn’t have a maintainer that I could trust to actually care about any other issues than his own.” He then offered some praise to Ingo, “as a long-term maintainer, trust me, I know what matters. And a person who can actually be bothered to follow up on problem reports is a *hell* of a lot more important than one who just argues with reporters.” Linus went on to note a comparison between the two schedulers:

“I realize that this comes as a shock to some of the SD people, but I’m told that there was a university group that did some double-blind testing of the different schedulers – old, SD and CFS – and that everybody agreed that both SD and CFS were better than the old, but that there was no significant difference between SD and CFS.”

Con Kolivas maintained the -ck Linux kernel patchset which aimed at improving the desktop experience since 2002, originally for the 2.4 kernel. Shortly after the decision to merge the CFS scheduler instead of his SD scheduler, and without an official response about merging his swap prefetch patch, he announced his decision to stop working on the Linux kernel. More information about his contributions and recent decision can be found in this interview on apcmag.com.

Ingo Molnar wrote the original CFS scheduler within a 62 hour window of time starting on April 11′th, 2007. Early reports on the CFS scheduler suggested it was an improvement over the old scheduler, but perhaps not over the SD scheduler. Ingo determinedly followed up on all bug and regression reports, rapidly improving the scheduler and addressing all known issues. It was merged into the 2.6.23 kernel on July 9′th, three months after it was written.

---

From: Kasper Sandberg [email blocked]
To: Linus Torvalds [email blocked]
Subject: Re: Linus 2.6.23-rc1
Date: Sat, 28 Jul 2007 04:04:39 +0200

(sorry for repost, but there seemed to have been some troubles..)

On Sun, 2007-07-22 at 14:04 -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> Ok, right on time, two weeks afetr 2.6.22, there’s a 2.6.23-rc1 out there.
>
> And it has a *ton* of changes as usual for the merge window, way too much
> for me to be able to post even just the shortlog or diffstat on the
> mailing list (but I had many people who wanted to full logs to stay
> around, so you’ll continue to see those being uploaded to kernel.org).
>
> Lots of architecture updates (for just about all of them – x86[-64], arm,
> alpha, mips, ia64, powerpc, s390, sh, sparc, um..), lots of driver updates
> (again, all over – usb, net, dvb, ide, sata, scsi, isdn, infiniband,
> firewire, i2c, you name it).
>
> Filesystems, VM, networking, ACPI, it’s all there. And virtualization all
> over the place (kvm, lguest, Xen).
>
> Notable new things might be the merge of the cfs scheduler, and the UIO
> driver infrastructure might interest some people.
>
Im still not so keen about this, Ingo never did get CFS to match SD in
smoothness for 3d applications, where my test subjects are quake(s),
world of warcraft via wine, unreal tournament 2004. And this is despite
many patches he sent me to try and tweak it. As far as im concerned, i
may be forced to unofficially maintain SD for my own systems(allthough
lots in the gaming community is bound to be interrested, as it does make
games lots better)

<snip>

From: Linus Torvalds [email blocked]
To: Kasper Sandberg [email blocked]
Subject: Re: Linus 2.6.23-rc1
Date: Fri, 27 Jul 2007 19:35:58 -0700 (PDT)

On Sat, 28 Jul 2007, Kasper Sandberg wrote:
>
> Im still not so keen about this, Ingo never did get CFS to match SD in
> smoothness for 3d applications, where my test subjects are quake(s),
> world of warcraft via wine, unreal tournament 2004. And this is despite
> many patches he sent me to try and tweak it.

You realize that different people get different behaviour, don’t you?
Maybe not.

People who think SD was “perfect” were simply ignoring reality. Sadly,
that seemed to include Con too, which was one of the main reasons that I
never ended entertaining the notion of merging SD for very long at all:
Con ended up arguing against people who reported problems, rather than
trying to work with them.

Andrew also reported an oops in the scheduler when SD was merged into -mm,
so there were other issues.

> As far as im concerned, i may be forced to unofficially maintain SD for
> my own systems(allthough lots in the gaming community is bound to be
> interrested, as it does make games lots better)

You know what? You can do whatever you want to. That’s kind of the point
of open source. Keep people honest by having alternatives.

But the the thing is, if you want to do a good job of doing that, here’s a
big hint: instead of keeping to your isolated world, instead of just
talking about your own machine and ignoring other peoples machines and
issues and instead of just denying that problems may exist, and instead of
attacking people who report problems, how about working with them?

That was where the SD patches fell down. They didn’t have a maintainer
that I could trust to actually care about any other issues than his own.

So here’s a hint: if you think that your particular graphics card setup is
the only one that matters, it’s not going to be very interesting for
anybody else.

[ I realize that this comes as a shock to some of the SD people, but I'm
told that there was a university group that did some double-blind
testing of the different schedulers - old, SD and CFS - and that
everybody agreed that both SD and CFS were better than the old, but that
there was no significant difference between SD and CFS. You can try
asking Thomas Gleixner for more details. ]

I’m happy that SD was perfect for you. It wasn’t for others, and it had
nobody who was even interested in trying to solve those issues.

As a long-term maintainer, trust me, I know what matters. And a person who
can actually be bothered to follow up on problem reports is a *hell* of a
lot more important than one who just argues with reporters.

Linus

From: Grzegorz Kulewski [email blocked]
To: Linus Torvalds [email blocked]
Subject: Re: [ck] Re: Linus 2.6.23-rc1
Date: Sat, 28 Jul 2007 09:09:06 +0200 (CEST)

On Fri, 27 Jul 2007, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> On Sat, 28 Jul 2007, Kasper Sandberg wrote:
>>
>> Im still not so keen about this, Ingo never did get CFS to match SD in
>> smoothness for 3d applications, where my test subjects are quake(s),
>> world of warcraft via wine, unreal tournament 2004. And this is despite
>> many patches he sent me to try and tweak it.
>
> You realize that different people get different behaviour, don’t you?
> Maybe not.
>
> People who think SD was “perfect” were simply ignoring reality. Sadly,
> that seemed to include Con too, which was one of the main reasons that I
> never ended entertaining the notion of merging SD for very long at all:
> Con ended up arguing against people who reported problems, rather than
> trying to work with them.

I don’t really want to keep all that -ck flamewar going but this sum-up is
a little strange for me:

If Con was thinking SD was “perfect” why he released 30+ versions of it?
And who knows how many versions of his previous scheduler?

Besides Con always tried to help people and improve his code if some bugs
or problems were reported. Archives of this list prove that. I reported
several problems (on list and privately) and all were fixed very fast and
with very kind responses. I had run -ck for months and years and it was
always very stable (I remember one broken “stable” version).

I don’t know what exactly are you refering to when you say about those
unaddressed reports but maybe it depends on who was asking, how and to do
what (for example – purely theoretical one, I don’t remember exact emails
you refering to so I am not saying it happened – stating at the beginning
that the whole design is unacceptable and interactivity hacks are a
must-have won’t make a friend from any maintainer and for sure lowers his
desire to get anything fixed for that guy). Or maybe Con had some bad day
or was depressed. Happens. But I really don’t remember Con ignoring too
many valuable user reports in last 3 years…

And no – I am not thinking that SD was “perfect”. Nothing is perfect,
especially not software. But it was based on months and years of Con’s
experience with desktop and gaming workloads and extensively tested in
similar uses by _many_ others. In nearly all possible desktop
configurations, with most games and all video drivers. This is why it was
perfectly designed and tuned for such workloads while still being general
enough and without any ugly hacks. And because of these tests and Con’s
believe that the desktop is very (most?) important all bugs and problems
in this area were probably killed long ago. I think even design was
changed and tuned a little at the early stages to help solve such
interactivity/dekstop/gaming problems.

So it does not surprise me that CFS is worse in such workloads (at least
for some people) because I strongly suspect that the number of people who
played games with current version of CFS is limited to about 5, maybe 10.
And I also suspect that you (and Ingo) will get many regression reports
when 2.6.23 is released (and months later too… or maybe you won’t
because users will be to “scared” to report such hard to mensure and
reproduce “unimportant” bugs). Hopefully such problems when reported will
be addressed as soon as they can. And hopefully they will be easy enough
to solve without rewriting or redesigning CFS and causing that way even
more regressions in other areas. If not people will probably be patching
O(1) scheduler back privately…

Thanks,

Grzegorz Kulewski

From: Linus Torvalds [email blocked]
Subject: Re: [ck] Re: Linus 2.6.23-rc1
Date: Sat, 28 Jul 2007 10:12:32 -0700 (PDT)

On Sat, 28 Jul 2007, Jonathan Jessup wrote:
>
> Linus, there is a complaint about the Linux kernel, this complaint is that
> the Linux kernel isn’t giving priorities to desktop interactivity and
> experience. The response on osnews.com etc have shown that there is public
> demand for it too.

No, the response on osnews.com only shows that there are a lot of armchair
complainers around.

People are suggesting that you’d have a separate “desktop kernel”. That’s
insane. It also shows total ignorance of maintainership, and reality. And
I bet most of the people there haven’t tested _either_ scheduler, they
just like making statements.

The fact is, I’ve _always_ considered the desktop to be the most important
part. And I suspect that that actually is true for most kernel developers,
because quite frankly, that’s what 99% of them ends up using. If a kernel
developer uses Windows for his day-to-day work, I sure as hell wouldn’t
want to have him developing Linux. That has nothing to do with anything
anti-windows: but the whole “eat your own dogfood” is a very fundamental
thing, and somebody who doesn’t do that shouldn’t be allowed to be even
_close_ to a compiler!

So the whole argument about how kernel developers think that the desktop
isn’t important is totally made-up crap by Con, and then parrotted by
osnews and other places.

The fact is, most kernel developers realize that Linux is used in
different places, on different machines, and with different loads. You
cannot make _everybody_ happy, but you can try to do as good a job as
possible. And doing “as good a job as possible” very much includes not
focusing on any particular load.

And btw, “the desktop” isn’t actually one single load. It’s in fact a lot
of very different loads, and different people want different things. What
makes the desktop so interesting is in fact that it shows more varied
usage than any other niche – and no, 3D gaming isn’t “it”.

> Maybe once or twice Con couldn’t help or fix an issue but isn’t that what
> open source software is all about anyway?

That’s not the issue.

Con wass fixated on one thing, and one thing only, and wasn’t interested
in anythign else – and attacked people who complained. Compare that to
Ingo, who saw that what Con’s scheduler did was good, and tried to solve
the problems of people who complained.

The ck mailing list is/was also apparently filled with people who all had
the same issues, which is seriously the *wrong* thing to do. It means that
any “consensus” coming out of that kind of private list is totally
worthless, because the people you ask are already in agreement – you have
a so-called “selection bias”, and they just reinforce their own opinions.

Which is why I don’t trust mailing lists with a narrow topic. They are
_useless_. If you cannot get many different people from _different_ areas
to test your patches, and cannot see the big picture, the end result won’t
likely be very interesting to others, will it?

The fact is, _any_ scheduler is going to have issues. I will bet you
almost any amount of money that people are going to complain about Ingo’s
scheduler when 2.6.23 is released. That’s not the issue: the issue is that
the exact same thing would have happened with CK too.

So if you are going to have issues with the scheduler, which one do you
pick: the one where the maintainer has shown that he can maintain
schedulers for years, can can address problems from _different_ areas of
life? Or the one where the maintainer argues against people who report
problems, and is fixated on one single load?

That’s really what it boils down to. I was actually planning to merge CK
for a while. The _code_ didn’t faze me.

Linus

---

From: Kasper Sandberg [email blocked]
To: Linus Torvalds [email blocked]
Subject: Re: Linus 2.6.23-rc1
Date: Sat, 28 Jul 2007 11:44:08 +0200

On Fri, 2007-07-27 at 19:35 -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote:
>
> On Sat, 28 Jul 2007, Kasper Sandberg wrote:
> >
> > Im still not so keen about this, Ingo never did get CFS to match SD in
> > smoothness for 3d applications, where my test subjects are quake(s),
> > world of warcraft via wine, unreal tournament 2004. And this is despite
> > many patches he sent me to try and tweak it.
>
> You realize that different people get different behaviour, don’t you?
> Maybe not.

Sure.

>
> People who think SD was “perfect” were simply ignoring reality. Sadly,
> that seemed to include Con too, which was one of the main reasons that I
> never ended entertaining the notion of merging SD for very long at all:
> Con ended up arguing against people who reported problems, rather than
> trying to work with them.

Im not saying its perfect, not at all, neither am i saying CFS is bad,
surely CFS is much better than the old one, and i agree with what that
university test you mentioned on kerneltrap says, that CFS and SD is
basically impossible to feel difference in, EXCEPT for 3d under load,
where CFS simply can not compete with SD, theres no but, this is how it
has acted on every system ive tested, and YES, others reported it too,
whether you choose to see it or not. and others people who run games on
linux tells me the exact same thing, and i have had quite a few people
try this.

>
> Andrew also reported an oops in the scheduler when SD was merged into -mm,
> so there were other issues.

And whats the point here? If you are trying to pull the old “Con just
runs away”, forget it, its a certainty that he would have put the
required time into fixing whatever issues arise.

>
> > As far as im concerned, i may be forced to unofficially maintain SD for
> > my own systems(allthough lots in the gaming community is bound to be
> > interrested, as it does make games lots better)
>
> You know what? You can do whatever you want to. That’s kind of the point
> of open source. Keep people honest by having alternatives.

True that

>
> But the the thing is, if you want to do a good job of doing that, here’s a
> big hint: instead of keeping to your isolated world, instead of just
> talking about your own machine and ignoring other peoples machines and
First off, i’ve personally run tests on many more machines than my own,
i’ve had lots of people try on their machines, and i’ve seen totally
unrelated posts to lkml, plus i’ve seen the experiences people are
writing about on IRC. Frankly, im not just thinking of myself.

> issues and instead of just denying that problems may exist, and instead of
> attacking people who report problems, how about working with them?

As i recall, there was only 1 persons reports that were attacked, and
that was because the person repeatedly reported the EXPECTED behavior as
broken, simply because it was FAIRLY allocating the cpu time, and this
did not meet with the dudes expectations. And it was after multiple
mails he was “attacked”

>
> That was where the SD patches fell down. They didn’t have a maintainer
> that I could trust to actually care about any other issues than his own.

You may not have been able to trust Con, but thats because you havent
taken the time to actually really see whats been going on, if you just
read the threads for SD you’d realize that he was more than willing to
maintain it, after all, why do you think he wrote and submitted it? you
think he just wrote it to piss you off by having it merged and leave?

>
> So here’s a hint: if you think that your particular graphics card setup is
> the only one that matters, it’s not going to be very interesting for
> anybody else.

as explained earlier, its not just my particular setup, but actually
that of alot of people, with lots of different hardware.

>
>
> [ I realize that this comes as a shock to some of the SD people, but I'm
> told that there was a university group that did some double-blind
> testing of the different schedulers - old, SD and CFS - and that
> everybody agreed that both SD and CFS were better than the old, but that
> there was no significant difference between SD and CFS. You can try
> asking Thomas Gleixner for more details. ]
>
> I’m happy that SD was perfect for you. It wasn’t for others, and it had
> nobody who was even interested in trying to solve those issues.
>
> As a long-term maintainer, trust me, I know what matters. And a person who
> can actually be bothered to follow up on problem reports is a *hell* of a
> lot more important than one who just argues with reporters.

Okay, i wasnt going to ask, but ill do it anyway, did you even read the
threads about SD? Con was extremely polite to everyone, and he did work
with a multitude of people, you seem to be totally deadlocked into the
ONE incident with a person that was unhappy with SD, simply for being a
fair scheduler.

From: Linus Torvalds [email blocked]
To: Kasper Sandberg [email blocked]
Subject: Re: Linus 2.6.23-rc1
Date: Sat, 28 Jul 2007 10:50:48 -0700 (PDT)

On Sat, 28 Jul 2007, Kasper Sandberg wrote:
>
> First off, i’ve personally run tests on many more machines than my own,
> i’ve had lots of people try on their machines, and i’ve seen totally
> unrelated posts to lkml, plus i’ve seen the experiences people are
> writing about on IRC. Frankly, im not just thinking of myself.

Ok, good. Has anybody tried to figure out why 3D games seem to be such a
special case?

I know Ingo looked at it, and seemed to think that he found and fixed
something. But it sounds like it’s worth a lot more discussion.

> Okay, i wasnt going to ask, but ill do it anyway, did you even read the
> threads about SD?

I don’t _ever_ go on specialty mailing lists. I don’t read -mm, and I
don’t read the -fs mailing lists. I don’t think they are interesting.

And I tried to explain why: people who concentrate on one thing tend to
become this self-selecting group that never looks at anything else, and
then rejects outside input from people who hadn’t become part of the “mind
meld”.

That’s what I think I saw – I saw the reactions from where external people
were talking and cc’ing me.

And yes, it’s quite possible that I also got a very one-sided picture of
it. I’m not disputing that. Con was also ill for a rather critical period,
which was certainly not helping it all.

> Con was extremely polite to everyone, and he did work
> with a multitude of people, you seem to be totally deadlocked into the
> ONE incident with a person that was unhappy with SD, simply for being a
> fair scheduler.

Hey, maybe that one incident just ended up being a rather big portion of
what I saw. Too bad. That said, the end result (Con’s public gripes about
other kernel developers) mostly reinforced my opinion that I did the right
choice.

But maybe you can show a better side of it all. I don’t think _any_
scheduler is perfect, and almost all of the time, the RightAnswer(tm) ends
up being not “one or the other”, but “somewhere in between”.

It’s not like we’ve come to the end of the road: the baseline has just
improved. If you guys can show that SD actually is better at some loads,
without penalizing others, we can (and will) revisit this issue.

So what you should take away from this is that: from what I saw over the
last couple of months, it really wasn’t much of a decision. The difference
in how Ingo and Con reacted to peoples reports was pretty stark. And no, I
haven’t followed the ck mailing list, and so yes, I obviously did get just
a part of the picture, but the part I got was pretty damn unambiguous.

But at the same time, no technical decision is ever written in stone. It’s
all a balancing act. I’ve replaced the scheduler before, I’m 100% sure
we’ll replace it again. Schedulers are actually not at all that important
in the end: they are a very very small detail in the kernel.