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Google Proposes New Mseal() Memory Sealing Syscall for Linux
- guappa 3y ago[flagged]
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- javier_e06 3y agoAh! The resounding NAK! https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/CAHk-=whFZoap+DBTYvJx6ohqPwn11Puzh7q4huFWDX9vBwXHgg@mail.gmail.com/ https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/CAHk-=whFZoap+DBTYvJx6ohqPwn11P... My take away: jeffxu@google.com has to go back to rethink the whole thing. Good idea, execution, not so, yet.
- ranguna 3y agoA bit aggressive, but beautiful code review nontheless.
- eklavya 3y agoMaybe this hero worship is why being a raging asshole is ok.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- WaffleIronMaker 3y agoSorry, I must missing something here, but how is he being a raging asshole? Looking through the linked code review, he's definitely very direct, and I can see how profanity is often uncomfortable to people who are used to formality, but he doesn't seem to attack anyone personally or focus on anything besides the technology?
- eklavya 3y agoHe is being a raging asshole by behaving like one? How is it ok to berate a contribution like that? Is it encouraging more people to contribute? Is it creating a positive environment? Let's park that for now, is it helping the technical discussion at all? It's just power tripping on the gatekeeper status. All of this could be said in a technical, professional manner. Many many great programmers do it everyday, sorry Linus, nobody is a God. People are not anybody's toilet paper.
- mhh__ 3y agoI would much rather have someone like Linus who at very least I would understand very quickly than a "leader" who is distant and only makes a fuss post-hoc
- foooorsyth 3y agoIt’s a bad review. The snarky prose is annoying. He could be much more concise as well. “Won’t merge. Commit messages need far more detail. Don’t do bitmask translations. All of these operations should use the same mask instead of creating redundant ones. Rethink the logic here, not sure if it makes sense. This needs a rewrite, not small tweaks” …was really all it needed. The wall of text is more offensive than the insulting tone.
- cmrdporcupine 3y agoOrdinarily I'd agree, e.g. within a company or team, I would not accept this kind of tone, it's not how peers communicate But it's also not Torvald's job to tutor here or be a mentor. He has limited time in the day. And the company doing the proposal here is Google. They probably should have come in with a more-better-finished product. The consequences to design errors in kernel syscalls are rather intense.
- foooorsyth 3y ago>He has limited time in the day So he spends it dunking on a proposal with snarky prose instead of a concise review without bashing the person trying to contribute. How efficient.
- cmrdporcupine 3y agoYeah I mean that's maybe fair, and I thought Torvalds had been making attempts to avoid this kind of tone. I still think even if he had been concise and terse he would have been perceived as slightly-rude though.
- hedora 3y agoThe proposed summary of the review is too terse and doesn't make any sense. I don't see any redundant prose in the original one. His concerns are clear, and he gives actionable suggestions for improvement. The tone + his opinion of the patch set is also clear. Would you rather get a code review that is full of vague euphemisms and tries not to hurt your feelings, and then spend months wasting time on a dead end approach because you thought minor tweaks would work? I'd much rather get one message that says where the bar for merging is so I could fix my code and get it merged. I absolutely wouldn't care if the latter was a bit sweary. I've worked at a place where all communication must be in professional tone and polite, and you cannot give valid technical feedback that might hurt someone's feelings. The verbal communications standards were weaponized by sycophants, who dominated middle management. It was the most passive-aggressive and hostile work environment (as in legal liability) I've ever encountered.
- varispeed 3y agoI can picture this as someone publicly berating junior employee for trying to do something good "in a wrong way". There is no need for such language. Other commenter here shown the whole "review" could be just one or two sentences. That to me shows someone has not been going to therapy.
- zelon88 3y agoCan you picture it as the passionate founder of the largest open source non-profit in existence telling a highly paid software engineer at the largest closed source tech conglomorate in the world that the self-serving code he's pushing into the repo you've been maintaining for 30 years is trash, because it is trash? Because that's what you're seeing here.
- ajkjk 3y agoYet it would be so, so, so easy to do that in a way that isn't so mean and sad to watch. It's a passionate founder with an abuse problem doing something that doesn't require abuse but being abusive anyway and, because they're too important, no one can easily prevent it.
- eviks 3y agoYou've added a bunch of irrelevant qualifications to a, to borrow your language, highly paid jerk in power enjoying being a jerk. This is also much easier to picture and much closer to describing the situation
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- groby_b 3y agoSo what? First, if you fly off the handle every time somebody pushes some bad code, you might want to find some help, because it's going to happen a lot. Everybody writes bad code from time to time, and the more people you work with, the more likely you are to encounter cases. Linus is sure working with a lot of people. Second, Linus has always been rude. This isn't because his beloved work of 30 years got sullied, it's because he has a temper and can get away with it. He had that temper back in 1991, and he's been at most slightly successful at tempering it since. He's repeatedly making the choice to be that way. He could choose a different response, but he prefers replying this way, for whatever reasons. You can argue if that is or isn't OK. But either way, it's a choice to be rude, not an innate emotional response because some dirty peon has sullied the œeuvre of the great artist.
- voidfunc 3y agoI'm surprised by so many people taking offense at it. Very direct and to the point, it's great. People have become so fragile in the last decade or so. It's pathetic.
- ranguna 3y agoOffended? Sorry my message must've hit a traumatic chord on your brain, but I didn't say I was offended, just that it was aggressive. Like watching wwa show, it's aggressive, but entertaining. Please try to not project your thinking too much next time you read someone else's comment next time.
- endisneigh 3y agoThe exact same points could’ve been made in a nicer fashion. Needlessly aggressive language imo. Would you speak to your teammates this way? Your child?
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- withinboredom 3y agoYes. We need more pointing out when people do idiotic things, not less. Otherwise, in a few generations, we'll be wondering why you would water plants with toilet water.
- dustyleary 3y agoIs it possible to point out that you disagree with something without being rude or aggressive in speech?
- withinboredom 3y agoHow was he rude or aggressive? He just said what he saw: shit code he'd have to maintain and he clearly didn't want to.
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- orangepurple 3y agoMatthew Wilcox dunked on it savagely too in https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/ZS6Ea4%2FKI0mKiRMv@casper.infradead.org/ https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/ZS6Ea4%2FKI0mKiRMv@casper.infra... It is your job to do this. You seem to have taken the attitude that you will give the Chrome team exactly what they asked for instead of trying to understand their requirements and give them what they need.
- cozzyd 3y agoAnd to add to the submitter's rough day, Theo de Raadt has joined the conversation. https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/55960.1697566804@cvs.openbsd.org/ https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/55960.1697566804@cvs.openbsd.or... mseal() is a clone of mimmutable(2), but with an extremely over-complicated API based upon dubious arguments.
- alain94040 3y agoAnd notice how his comment is constructive despite the lack of name calling or abusive language.
- withinboredom 3y agoI'd love to see the name calling. I've read it several times now. I see him saying that this random patch out of the blue, without any discussion, doesn't follow any of the guidelines to submit a kernel patch, doesn't make any sense (in fact, seems to reimplement things already in the kernel), and isn't being accepted without a significant rework. He never, ever, once, demeans the person who submitted the patch or shows a pattern of abuse to that person -- if you look up the definition of "abusive" you'll see it says (emphasis mine): "extremely offensive AND insulting". While the text may be offensive (to some, to my ex-military eyes, this is being nice), he never once insulted the author.
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- kramerger 3y agoI like that Linus isn't wasting time on niceties and goes right down to business. Sucks to be on the receiving end, but in the end its better for everyone. Wish our developers could work like this.
- generalizations 3y agoIronically, I've taken to asking ChatGPT to "Please be blunt, Linus Torvalds-style" - it results in far more useful feedback.
- water-your-self 3y agoHonestly the tone of his email seemed very nice. He was informative and gave substantial feedback.
- whoisthemachine 3y agoWell if Linus had worked with any android apis, he wouldn't be the least surprised by completely illogical APIs coming out of Google (or making once completely logical APIs illogical).
- Varriount 3y agoAre the Android APIs that bad? (I've yet to develop an Android app)
- londons_explore 3y agoThe user-visible API's aren't great, but okayish. The innards are spaghetti.
- ihuk 3y agoI would argue that a lot of public APIs are a mess. We used to joke that instead of firing the bottom 10%, Google just reallocates them to the Android team.
- pjmlp 3y agoDuring the early days Android APIs were clearly written by C folks with zero experience in Java programming culture.
- izacus 3y agoDuring the early days the APIs were written by folks who had to make Java OS work on a 550MHz ARM, 192MB of RAM with software rendering. "Java programming culture" outright would not work which was obvious to anyone trying to write fast code back then. (I also wonder how many users are willing to trade off 15% of their battery time to developer java programming culture.)
- josefx 3y ago
- londons_explore 3y agoThe use case here is a process saying "I don't trust my future self not to do something stupid". Mseal alone doesn't seem enough for that. There are plenty of other API's that would also need locking down - and many future API's too. This looks like a big maintenance burden forever into the future. Perhaps a better model is seccomp BPF. Allow a process to install a seccomp BPF filter on itself. The filter could prevent calling mmap, mprotect, mremap and friends. The filter could also prevent the modification of the installed filter. That seems far more general and far more powerful and requires less kernel code with only a handful of uses.
- supriyo-biswas 3y agoChrome already uses seccomp-bpf to that end, this is why the `chrome-sandbox` binary is setuid.
- londons_explore 3y agoPerhaps the real solution here is to let non-root use seccomp-bpf.
- boustrophedon 3y agoNon-root can use seccomp-bpf. Chrome already does.
- londons_explore 3y agoSo theres nothing preventing OP implementing what they want entirely in userspace with no kernel changes already?
- jagrsw 3y agomalloc can use mmap (aside from s/brk) - it's impossible these days to sandbox any more complex program and not allow mmap (arguments can be limited though to only a subset of flags).
- LastTrain 3y agoI used to think these Linus smack-downs were pretty funny. I guess I still kinda do, but I'm not proud of it. These were more appropriate when Linus was an underdog - now he's just being an asshole, or at the very least unprofessional. I've contributed Linux kernel code, thankfully several rungs below anything the God emperor would be looking at - I would have been wrecked by a review like this.
- keep_reading 3y agoThe person confidently submitting this without understanding what they're doing is a serious problem. The kernel maintainers only have so much time. Spending it reviewing things that should have never made it to their inbox is going to piss them off.
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- spongebobstoes 3y agoBeing frustrated with the quality of someone's work is understandable. With a bit of practice it's possible to give the same feedback, but in a way that will encourage and teach, instead of what this was.
- BiteCode_dev 3y agoTeaching is way less efficient than filtering, unfortunately. I used to think we should strive to make everybody grow. But the more I've been confronted with hard challenges and limited resources, the more I've had to filter out. Now I lean toward "filter first, teach to what remains, repeat". And yes, being tactless is a very good filter, even give the obvious side effects.
- LastTrain 3y agoYou’re just rationalizing your own bad behavior - it’s lazy.
- 0xbadcafebee 3y agoLooking at Torvalds' responses today, as an older person who has been through some stuff, it's pretty clear he has serious unresolved emotional issues. It's not even that his comments are dickish... it sounds more like a cry for help to me now. Somebody who's been hurt and lashes out as a way to protect themselves, their ego, or the unfair standard they hold themselves or others to. The fact that he's a boy king doesn't help, because he can always take his toys and go home if anybody mentions he should see a therapist.
- oasisaimlessly 3y agoWell aren't you the pinnacle of maturity.
- NoGravitas 3y agoOr it's just pretty clear that he's Finnish.
- zelon88 3y agoWhat do you think Linux would look like today if the kernel team was friendly and outgoing and willing to put on kid gloves and help all the newcomers? What would it look like if everyone's code were "good enough"? What would enterprise look like if Linus was polite and held everybody's hand who wanted to push code into the kernel? Would Linux be as far along as it is? Would it be the same quality?
- 0xbadcafebee 3y agoI can't tell if this is sarcasm or not. HN is a hellscape of insane nerds on the spectrum with no EQ. Do you actually think rudeness directly correlates to code quality? Like, the more of a dick you are, the better your code gets? What kind of sadistic computer science class were you subjected to? Did you watch the movie "whiplash" and take it as a truism?
- withinboredom 3y agoI can't tell if this is sarcasm or not. Apparently, personal attacks work just fine to keep commenters from replying. But I'm here anyway.
- gigatexal 3y agoI found nothing amiss in Linus’s response. No personal attacks. Just hitting bad code and even suggestions for future fixes which all show a different Linus, a much more accommodating Linus who he and the other maintainers have the tall task of having to maintain quality in the Linux kernel — software that literally runs (most of) the internet.
- carapace 3y agoAs an aside, all this second-guessing and backseat driving of Linus Torvalds is getting a little ridiculous. "Hey nice kernel but could you also behave in a way that I approve as well? Otherwise I'm going to go around the Internet complaining about what a big mean jerk you are. Okay? Thanks." - - - - Edit to add: I've read the thing now and it seems mild and reasonable to me.
- o11c 3y agoWouldn't that break debugging? It's very common for the debugger to forcibly make a read-only page read-write. Maybe it wouldn't, but I definitely would hope for some mention of ptrace.
- darepublic 3y agoJust did a code review where I wanted to let loose. But lacked the confidence plus practically I knew it would just poison relations to be expressive like this