Maintenance of Linux/MIPS?

Hi,

There are a lot of patches at
https://patchwork.linux-mips.org/project/linux-mips/list/ that appear to be under the "New" state and have not had a chance to be reviewed yet.

What can we do to help speed up the review process, do we need more reviewers? It seems like most patches affecting Linux/MIPS are still core MIPS kernel changes, but would it help if say, people were queuing SoC/board specific patches in trees and submit pull requests? Would that help lower the amount of patches to review?

Any other suggestion?

Thanks!

Hello,

Quoted 12 lines · On Friday, 25 August 2017 14:21:33 PDT Florian Fainelli wrote:

Hi,

There are a lot of patches at
https://patchwork.linux-mips.org/project/linux-mips/list/ that appear to be under the "New" state and have not had a chance to be reviewed yet.

What can we do to help speed up the review process, do we need more reviewers? It seems like most patches affecting Linux/MIPS are still core MIPS kernel changes, but would it help if say, people were queuing SoC/board specific patches in trees and submit pull requests? Would that help lower the amount of patches to review?

Quoted 3 lines

Any other suggestion?

Thanks!

Personally I think it'd probably be good if Ralf were willing to formally share maintainership duties with someone else or a group of people. I think James for example would be a great choice, and already dons a maintainer hat.

As-is Ralf ends up being a bottleneck a lot of the time, and the backlog in patchwork is pretty good evidence of that. There are a whole lot of patches that ought to be going into v4.14, and that ought to be sat in linux-next right now in preparation for that. Sadly not many of them are, and usually that remains the case until very close to the merge window. Sharing the load could only help with this.

Thanks,
Paul

Quoted 19 lines · Paul Burton

Hello,

Quoted 15 lines · On Friday, 25 August 2017 14:21:33 PDT Florian Fainelli wrote:

Hi,

There are a lot of patches at
https://patchwork.linux-mips.org/project/linux-mips/list/ that appear to be under the "New" state and have not had a chance to be reviewed yet.

What can we do to help speed up the review process, do we need more reviewers? It seems like most patches affecting Linux/MIPS are still core MIPS kernel changes, but would it help if say, people were queuing SoC/board specific patches in trees and submit pull requests? Would that help lower the amount of patches to review?

Any other suggestion?

Thanks!

Quoted 3 lines

Personally I think it'd probably be good if Ralf were willing to formally share maintainership duties with someone else or a group of people. I think James for example would be a great choice, and already dons a maintainer hat.

FWIW, I agree. James has a lot of experience here and has served as maintainer when Ralf was away in the past. Making him a permanent co-maintainer, or similar, with the explicit mandate of getting patches upstream to Linus, would be beneficial to all who rely on the MIPS Linux kernel.

David.

Quoted 14 lines

As-is Ralf ends up being a bottleneck a lot of the time, and the backlog in patchwork is pretty good evidence of that. There are a whole lot of patches that ought to be going into v4.14, and that ought to be sat in linux-next right now in preparation for that. Sadly not many of them are, and usually that remains the case until very close to the merge window. Sharing the load could only help with this.

Thanks,
Paul