[PATCH] [RFC PATCH] BPF backend

[Chandler Carruth]

On Wed, Dec 3, 2014 at 2:56 PM, Alexei Starovoitov <
alexei.starovoitov at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Wed, Dec 3, 2014 at 2:09 PM, Tim Northover <t.p.northover at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >> Please let me know your feedback and steps to get it merged.
> >
> > Could I ask who's going to maintain this backend? Targets without an
> > active LLVM sub-community behind them tend to slowly bit-rot until
> > everyone else gets fed up enough with fixing it when they refactor
> > things; they then get removed.
>
> Obviously I will maintain it just like I did during 3.2, 3.3, 3.4
> timeframe.
> I expect people will step up in maintainership of backend when they
> start writing their own front-ends for it.
> We may have one front-end with dtrace-like language and another
> front-end with networking oriented language soon enough in the future,
> since C as a front-end is too expressive for what kernel allows it to do.


Given that a community as large as the Linux kernel community has a
concerted stake in this, I think it's entirely reasonable to expect someone
from that community to maintain it. If none are willing to do so at some
point in the future, it should also be reasonable to remove it. Unlike many
other backends, it doesn't seem hard to find and establish a maintainer
from the primary users of the backend because they are part of a rather
large, established open source project.

That said, I think it's still reasonable to keep this in an experimental
status where API updates might not be made immediately, etc., until the
rest of the community gets to know you (Alexei) as a responsive maintainer
and a reasonable amount of trust both of the technical bits and the
maintainers develop.

My 2 cents.
-Chandler
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