Re: [PATCH] x86: unify "numa=" command line option handling

["Jan Beulich" <JBeulich@novell.com>]

>>> On 07.01.11 at 13:57, Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu> wrote:

> * Jan Beulich <JBeulich@novell.com> wrote:
> 
>> >>> On 07.01.11 at 10:58, David Rientjes <rientjes@google.com> wrote:
>> > On Fri, 7 Jan 2011, Jan Beulich wrote:
>> > 
>> >> However, the problem my patch addresses has been long standing
>> >> (I noted it with our .32 based kernel, but according to my looking at
>> >> the code it would go back to at least .27), so I'd like to ask for it to
>> >> be merged independently (and I should probably have copied stable
>> >> too), unless (quite unlikely) Tejun's merge is intended to also be
>> >> applied to stable kernels.
>> >> 
>> > 
>> > I don't think this should be targeted to -stable since it's not a bugfix; 
>> > this is adding a feature that allows you to disable acpi parsing of the 
>> > SRAT on i386.
>> 
>> How is this not a bug fix if it allows a system to boot that previously
>> didn't?
> 
> btw., that's an absolutely key piece of information that REALLY should have 
> been 
> included in the changelog of the first patch. It is more important than all 
> of the 
> changelog.

Quoting that text: "In order to be able to suppress the use of SRAT
tables that 32-bit Linux can't deal with (possibly leading to a non-
bootable system, without disabling ACPI altogether), move the
"numa=" option handling to common code."

To me it says just that. And of course, not every system with a
not understood SRAT would be yielded non-bootable, hence the
wording "possibly leading to ...".

Jan