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From an email from Linus Torvalds to GKH
"Greg just for your information, I will *not* be merging any code from Kay [Sievers] into the kernel until this constant pattern is fixed.
This has been going on for *years*, and doesn't seem to be getting any better. This is relevant to you because I have seen you talk about the kdbus patches, and this is a heads-up that you need to keep them separate from other work. Let distributions merge it as they need to and maybe we can merge it once it has been proven to be stable by whatever distro that was willing to play games with the developers.
But I'm not willing to merge something where the maintainer is known to not care about bugs and regressions and then forces people in other projects to fix their project. Because I am *not* willing to take patches from people who don't clean up after their problems, and don't admit that it's their problem to fix."
(Score: 1, Troll) by isostatic on Friday April 04 2014, @08:11PM
Who is GKH, who is Kay Sievers and why should I care about Kernel politics?
(Score: 2) by tynin on Friday April 04 2014, @08:15PM
Agreed. While I do love hearing about Linus ripping on people, some context is needed.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Thexalon on Friday April 04 2014, @08:47PM
My impression is that periodically, Linus makes a big decision about what will and will not be included. Back on the other site, there were a bunch of these stories that would show up whenever it happened from miffed kernel devs and/or their supporters. In some cases, it's been so frequent as to appear to be a concerted effort to remove Linus as BDFL of Linux.
And Linus has been pretty clear about his basic mantra: Don't Break Userspace. And this post is presenting a pretty good corollary: If you break userspace, apologize and do your very best to fix it. Both of these seem like very good rules to have for kernel development.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by edIII on Friday April 04 2014, @09:43PM
I've heard he can be a real jerk, but from everything in TFS, it sounds very reasonable and he is just calling out a piss-poor programmer.
There should be more people like him, not less, involved in Linux.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by naubol on Friday April 04 2014, @08:17PM
I think it was really better said to be an email to the LKML (Linux Kernel Mailing List).
Aside from being our version of page 6, I think kernel politics is interesting because it exposes the issues that come up in open source and how they're handled in one of the most (THE most?) important open source project in the world where the stakes are really high.
Reading through them discussing how to handle one misbehaving stakeholder without punishing the others and to do so in a clean way is a fascinating bit of software management problem solving. That last bit strikes me as important to the SN community.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Bob The Cowboy on Friday April 04 2014, @08:19PM
1) Looks like a Kernel Dev ;)
2) Looks like a systemd Dev
3) Don't know, but no one's making you
Basically the issue boiled down to something like:
If you pass 'debug' to the linux kernel boot command (presumably/historically to debug the kernel), systemd parses that and floods dmesg with its own debugging info. Apparently it floods dmesg with so much of its own debugging info it locks up the machine.
The systemd dev (Kay) basically said "you guys don't own the word debug, if someone passes debug to the kernel, we're going to assume they want to debug systemd as well."
This didn't go over well...
(Score: 2) by isostatic on Friday April 04 2014, @08:39PM
2) Looks like a systemd Dev
Ahh, now it makes sense. I've heard of systemd, and the "controversial" use of it.
Seems like the obvious thing would be to pass "debugsysd" to allow systemd to be debugged.
(Score: 2) by forsythe on Friday April 04 2014, @09:19PM
That solution (actually the variant 'systemd.debug', to match a few other 'systemd.xyz' parameters) was actually presented, and a patch was even submitted for it. The rejection of that suggestion may very well have been a significant factor in Linus' ongoing irritation.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 05 2014, @04:50AM
> Seems like the obvious thing would be to
Actually, what the kernel needs is:
if ( strcmp( pid[1], "systemd" ) {
kernel_panic();
}
and just stop the systemd craziness at its start.
(Score: 1) by GeminiDomino on Saturday April 05 2014, @06:55PM
No no no! That's exactly why Linus tore this jerk a new asshole to begin with! He's apparently had the attitude of "change your code to suit mine" for years, and that's just what you're playing into! ;)
"We've been attacked by the intelligent, educated segment of our culture"
(Score: 2) by nukkel on Friday April 18 2014, @04:39PM
Either you are Kay, or you forgot a "!" operator.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Open4D on Friday April 04 2014, @09:01PM
The systemd bug report is: https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=76935 [freedesktop.org]
But that was closed.
So there was an LKML thread here [iu.edu], about possible Linux patches to deal with the problem instead. Torvalds's announcement about Sievers is the first reply.
But now the systemd bug has a status of "REOPENED". So maybe Torvalds's announcement had the desired effect?
(Score: 3, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 04 2014, @09:48PM
And here's a fix:
+ if (!strcmp(p->p_name, "systemd")) killproc(p, "fuck you");
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 05 2014, @01:39AM
fuck me?
not syncing: attempt to kill init!
fuck you!
(Score: 1) by Subsentient on Saturday April 05 2014, @02:46AM
Oh man, that's a funny one.
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." -Jiddu Krishnamurti
(Score: 2) by zocalo on Friday April 04 2014, @11:47PM
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
(Score: 1) by blackpaw on Saturday April 05 2014, @08:24AM
Wow, that's just plain childish. How embarrassing. Its like a five year sticking their fingers in their ears going "NYAH NYAH NAYH! CAN'T HEAR YOU!"
(Score: 2) by TheGratefulNet on Friday April 04 2014, @09:06PM
if he knew (or later, found out) that the shared word 'debug' caused so much trouble at boot time, why on earth would anyone want to argue to keep it that way instead of just making it debug_systemd or something not in collision with the standard debug word?
sheesh. there are things to argue for; but this is not one of them. linus was right. thou shalt NOT break userland via any kernel change!
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
(Score: 3, Insightful) by emg on Friday April 04 2014, @09:23PM
Because the goal of systemd appears to be to take over the entire operating system until the kernel is just a minor part of systemd?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by frojack on Saturday April 05 2014, @02:52AM
Pretty much this.
Poettering is about as arrogant an ass as you will ever see.
Systemd's hooks go way too deep and very little of it has been reviewed from a security standpoint. There is no telling what it can do or might be doing.
It wasn't written for you.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2, Funny) by GeminiDomino on Saturday April 05 2014, @06:57PM
What?!
EMACS won't stand for that sort of thing for very long, let me tell you.
"We've been attacked by the intelligent, educated segment of our culture"
(Score: 1) by mverwijs on Friday April 04 2014, @09:56PM
Not only does systemd parses that, it also renders the system unbootable at that point.
Another gem of systemd: disable CGROUPS and it segfaults. Again: rendering the system unusable.
The problem here is not the bugs though. It's the attitude of the developers: "Works for me. Your problem. WONTFIX."
(Score: 1) by Subsentient on Saturday April 05 2014, @02:48AM
Do I dare advertise the glory that is Epoch with this opportunity?
Ahh, screw it. http://universe2.us/epoch.html [universe2.us]
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." -Jiddu Krishnamurti
(Score: 2) by tibman on Saturday April 05 2014, @03:41AM
Saw it mentioned in the March Gentoo monthly newsletter. Question #4 in the interview of TomWij: http://blogs.gentoo.org/news/2014/03/31/gentoo-mon thly-newsletter-march-2014/ [gentoo.org]
Nothing marked stable yet: http://packages.gentoo.org/package/sys-apps/epoch? arches=prefix [gentoo.org]
SN won't survive on lurkers alone. Write comments.
(Score: 1) by Subsentient on Saturday April 05 2014, @06:45AM
1.0.1 is the current stable release. Yeah, not sure why they've kept it as unstable.
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." -Jiddu Krishnamurti
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Grishnakh on Friday April 04 2014, @08:40PM
Who is GKH, who is Kay Sievers and why should I care about Kernel politics?
If you don't know who Greg Kroah-Hartman is, then you're obviously completely clueless about the Linux kernel and its development. That's fine; you don't have to be an expert in all things tech or software to hang out on this site. For people who are interested in kernel politics, this is a very important and interesting story. If that doesn't describe you, then just move along. Not every story is going to be of interest to every single reader.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by TK on Friday April 04 2014, @08:55PM
Remember that pet peeve from the other site about not explaining acronyms? I think it applies to initials too.
The fleas have smaller fleas, upon their backs to bite them, and those fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum
(Score: 3, Insightful) by jimshatt on Friday April 04 2014, @09:22PM
Well, I am clueless about Linux kernel development, but I might still be interested. Explaining things to clueless but interested people is a good thing, methinks. But now that you have at least provided his full name, so I can look it up. So, thanks, I guess.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Friday April 04 2014, @09:47PM
Sorry, I didn't mean to come off as snarky, but generally I just assume that if someone isn't already familiar with the leading names in kernel development by now, they're probably just not that interested in it in general. By all means, if you want to learn more, go right ahead; the LKML at tux.org/lkml is the site of the official mailing list where you can read all about it, and lwn.net is even better if you're not directly involved and just want to read about it, as they have great in-depth articles about the goings-on in the community (specifically at lwn.net/kernel) and in development.
(Score: 1, Flamebait) by frojack on Saturday April 05 2014, @02:58AM
Saying you didn't mean to be snarky (when in fact your first replay was a virtuoso study in snark) doesn't let you off the hook, nor does handing out a reading assignment.
Take your own advice.
If you don't want to help out new users and explain a few things, just move along. Don't sling thinly veiled insults. It would have taken you less verbiage to explain who these people are than to tell the OP to piss-off.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 3, Informative) by edIII on Friday April 04 2014, @09:47PM
Don't feel bad at all.
The original poster just asked for context and was specific in what they wanted to know.
It was a question, not a statement.
We should treat it like a question, and there really are no stupid questions. Just stupid answers.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 2) by isostatic on Monday April 07 2014, @07:05PM
If you don't know who Greg Kroah-Hartman is, then you're obviously completely clueless about the Linux kernel and its development.
Quite, I haven't paid much attention to development since about 2000, and it looks like he only started writing kernel code in 1999. In fact I stopped compiling kernels around 2001, as the stock debian ones tended to meet my needs. I think that was the time Alan Cox was finishing his maintenance duties on 2.2 and some whippersnapper was maintaining 2.4?
A far better summary would have included something about the fact Kay Sievers wrote systemd, and the interaction between systemd and the kernel is causing a lot political problems, so Linus has "discussed" the matter with his chief lieutenant, that there's no technical issue here, it seems that the systemd guy is kicking up a fuss because he doesn't like to be corrected, or shown to be wrong. Something like context for those of us that don't follow LKML.
(Score: 2) by fliptop on Friday April 04 2014, @08:41PM
Works for Red Hat and is the developer of udev and systemd [wikipedia.org].
Because you're a nerd?
Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 04 2014, @08:58PM
Don't let Kay get all the credit for systemd, the other primary author is the same genius who gave us pulseaudio.
Yeah, this is going to go well.
Looks like I'll be switching to Slackware once a conventional init mechanism is no longer feasible in Debian.
(Score: 2) by forsythe on Friday April 04 2014, @09:45PM
I actually switched to Gentoo a while ago because the ports-like package management allows me to use Wine without consolekit. Since the systemd thing hit, I've been very pleased with its sysvinit + openrc init system. To me, systemd is a rather poor solution in frantic search of a problem.
(Score: 1) by Subsentient on Saturday April 05 2014, @02:51AM
Uhh
http://universe2.us/epoch.html [universe2.us]
(Boy, I'm having a field day!)
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." -Jiddu Krishnamurti
(Score: 2) by zocalo on Friday April 04 2014, @11:39PM
On the plus side, they've driven so many people to BSD that Netcraft is *still* getting it wrong.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
(Score: 2) by frojack on Saturday April 05 2014, @03:05AM
Not to mention tmp not being tmp anymore, and you aren't safe in cleaning tmp between boots.
Systemd might be needed, because initd has become somewhat unworkable in larger machines, but it goes way too far and messes up way too much of the existing system.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by neagix on Saturday April 05 2014, @09:07AM
Wait aaaa minute since when this is not allowed anymore? and what do you mean specifically?
(Score: 2) by zocalo on Saturday April 05 2014, @09:49AM
And yes, there's a lot more of the "not our fault!" attitude, and although that write up is by the SystemD team and Udev caused the breakage, there's such a heavy overlap between the members of the two teams it doesn't really make much difference.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
(Score: 2) by neagix on Monday April 07 2014, @06:32AM
Yeah, I heard about this. I was wondering about the possibility to delete /tmp across reboots.
In general, it's like hearing the loud screech of the chains of legacy...not saying that everything should have been left untouched, but that not all the problems have been addressed with the new solutions.
Is this the chance for a new init project (Epoch?) or maturity will be reached afterwards?
Disclaimer: I would have forbidden the author to access any PC just because of PulseAudio already
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Saturday April 05 2014, @11:38AM
sudo mod me up
(Score: 1) by GeminiDomino on Saturday April 05 2014, @07:02PM
As someone who's been out of the FreeBSD arena for a (long) while:
Do you still have to compile from scratch to do a package/system update?
I used to love FreeBSD, but having a couple of dozen heterogenous hardware servers to keep current, that's a lot of downtime.
"We've been attacked by the intelligent, educated segment of our culture"
(Score: 1) by David_W on Sunday April 06 2014, @01:35AM
Not really, no. Binary system updates can be done with freebsd-update [freebsd.org], and the new pkg (pkgng) [freebsd.org] stuff is more focused around binary packages. I still build my stuff from source, so I can't vouch for how good these tools are at their jobs, but they definitely exist. As always, the Handbook [freebsd.org] has much more info.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 04 2014, @08:52PM
-Grek Koah Hartman , more or less 'the second in command after Linux Torvalds' in the kernel community.
-Kay Sievers, the creator of solutions in search of problems. Created udev, which is ok(ish) though somewhat arcane. Created systemd which is an abomination. Lets put loads and loads of complicated functionality in the single process which may *never* crash because that would hang your computer. Sounds like a swell idea! And now creator of kernel-dbus.
RANT:
I kid you not, a dbus server *inside* the kernel. Because it will be slightly faster than outside maybe? I'm not a microkernel purist but come on what's next: put the compiler inside the kernel, or maybe a wordprocessor? Dbus might have it's place (though the dependency hell it generates because all sorts of apps start to rely on other apps being running makes me sometimes yearn for simpler times when each app would be more self contained), but *not in the kernel*. Why anybody would think that the speed benefits would outweight the stablity costs I really don't understand (same for systemd). EOR
-You should care, because Having a stubborn friendly asshole like Linus at the helm is the only thing from linux degenerating info a mess of featuritis.
This is very much news for nerds. Don't like it, don't read it. Some other people do.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 04 2014, @09:28PM
Our motto is SoylentNews is people. So, yeh...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 05 2014, @12:23AM
Greg Koah-Hartman
Outside of your typo and missing hyphen, excellent post.
Linux has the best hardware support of *any* OS;
it has better support for new hardware than old EULAware OSes (notably, EoL'd OSes)
and Linux has better support for old hardware than new EULAware OSes.
This is largely due to gregkh. [googleusercontent.com] (orig) [lwn.net]
When your oddball device Just Works(tm) under Linux, [googleusercontent.com] (orig) [archlinux.org] it's probably Greg whom you owe a beer.
-- gewg_
(Score: 1) by GeminiDomino on Saturday April 05 2014, @07:07PM
I thought systemD was created by whatshisface... the one who shat pulseaudio at us years ago. Lennart Pottering.
"We've been attacked by the intelligent, educated segment of our culture"
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