[arch-general] Tobias Powalowski and his nonsensical maintenance decisions

[Eric Blau]

On Fri, Apr 28, 2017 at 12:29 PM, Carsten Mattner via arch-general
<arch-general at archlinux.org> wrote:
>
> The constant churn of refactorings and whatnot makes it impossible for
> all the hardware that say i915 supports to actually work reliably
> across kernel releases. What used to work flawlessly in 4.1 can be
> broken in 4.4 because the devs do not test with Intel GPUs older than
> Gen7 for example, all the while claiming it's supported in the now
> refactored but practically untested code.

Carsten,

I agree with you about i915. I've been hitting this kernel panic
regularly, about once per day, freezing my entire machine:

Bug 99295 - [Regression BDW] kernel panic in Intel i915 module,
complete system freeze in 4.10-rc2
https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=99295

There's a fix that's been submitted to the tip, but no effort has been
made to patch the bug in the 4.10.x stable series. It seems the devs
don't care about having a stable kernel to use, only about moving
forward the tip and staying on the bleeding edge. Shouldn't at least
showstopper kernel panics be patched to the "stable" release?

I requested a fix on the tip to be patched in the 4.9.x stable series
a couple months ago because I tested the fix myself and verified it
"worked for me" but it was subsequently reverted. I'm sure I don't
know enough about the i915 driver to be able to make these types of
decisions about what should or should not be patched other than to
help with testing, but it would be nice if the i915 dev team made an
effort to propagate fixes to stable as well.

-Eric