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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: November 23rd, 2023

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  • There are chipset design issues and there are firmware issues. The former is much more difficult to address quickly than the latter, sure.

    Torvalds’s point, though, is that hardware developers (Intel specifically) keep making changes that “fix” imaginary problems while screwing over compatibility, and trying to shift the onus of making it work to the volunteers who contribute to open source instead of just paying their engineers to produce working firmware.

    If the problem were only with defective silicon, I’d agree with you (to an extent), but this is not really an issue with the circuits.

















  • Ted Ts’o was way out of line in that conference and was clearly channeling his inner ca. 2001 Torvalds.

    I think Rust is a better path forward for a majority of the kernel/driver code maintained currently, but it is definitely going to take time for it to gain a foothold. I also think there is some condescension on both sides that is completely unjustified and needs to stop.

    The hardline C devs that don’t want to learn Rust need to accept that at some point they will have to either adapt or pass the torch, and that no amount of whining or bitching in public forums is going to change that.

    The Rust devs that are getting upset because people are “attacking” their favorite language need to accept that there will be substantial and impassioned resistance to making broad language changes to a set of projects that have existed for decades. It would be an uphill battle for any language to try to supersede C in the kernel; this is not a condemnation or attack on Rust or its zealots, it’s a matter of momentum and greybeard stubbornness.



  • In fairness, “I don’t want to maintain bindings for a language I never intend to use” is a perfectly reasonable position.

    The typical answer here is for the language evangelist to implement and maintain the bindings, and accept the responsibility of keeping them in sync with the upstream (or understand that they will be broken for however long it takes for another community member to update them).