Comment 243 for bug 131094

Can we please stop referring to this as a bug? It may be a problem, it may be
the product of a collection of bugs, but it is almost certainly not one bug.
This report has to-date accumulated almost 250 comments, including numerous
incomparable benchmarks, dozens of descriptions of subtly different problems,
countless flawed workarounds, and yet not a single bisection attempt.

In fact, this report is in far worse shape than the kernel.org report which was
closed months ago due to lack of focus. I strongly believe that this report
should see the same end. So far the patchset which was most likely to fix this
has already been merged (8cab4754: vmscan: make mapped executable pages the
first class citizen). Since this clearly hasn't improved things, it is time
that we go back to the drawing board.

At this point, the only responsible course forward is to close this bug and
start from scratch, this timing taking greater care to keep independent bugs in
separate reports; otherwise we will end up in the same situation as we
currently find ourselves. In general, I believe that Ubuntu's bug tracker
really isn't an appropriate forum for discussing what is demonstrably a
cross-distribution kernel issue. While we can certainly have a tracker here,
true technical discussion belongs on the kernel.org report.

As has been demonstrated in the past, this bug is quite difficult to pin-down.
A responsive desktop is the product of interactions between components in all
layers of the stack, including (perhaps) most importantly the memory management
and block layers. We must avoid convoluting things any more than they already
are by tying together matters which are fundamentally independent (no more
driver references; this has been shown to be a largely hardware-independent
bug, treat it as such).

Anyways, despite all of these considerations, I am hopeful that a solution will
be found. As a first order of business, someone with the proper permissions
must put this bug out of its long-lived misery. Then perhaps we can move
forward to isolating the true cause of this issue.