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This is really great news: > Ubuntu's low-latency kernel is mostly Kconfig configuration changes applied to their kernel build that they are now at least consi

This is really great news: > Ubuntu's low-latency kernel is mostly Kconfig configuration changes applied to their kernel build that they are now at least considering to make by default. Ubuntu used to have an absolute monster of a hacked up franken-kernel compared to mainstream, but (very fortunately) over the years it's gotten much, much closer to upstream. It was honestly a bit of a nightmare trying to apply a set of custom patches on top of it (to improve a driver that was buggy for many years that I hacked in a way that made it work awesome but would never be accepted upstream because it violated FCC regulations). I'm an outside observer so pure speculation, but I have suspected that it was painful for the Canonical kernel team just as it was for me, and that they made a concerted effort to get away from the craziness. In related news, the people who backport kernel fixes to LTS versions they maintain for their distros (think Canonical and Red Hat, for example) are some of the most unsung heroes in the world. That work is brutal and takes a lot of dedication, and when you're doing your job perfectly nobody knows, but when you mess up everybody knows. That leads to a lot of thanklessness.

csdvrx 3y ago
> to improve a driver that was buggy for many years that I hacked in a way that made it work awesome but would never be accepted upstream because it violated FCC regulations Now I want to know more! Was it a misbehaving wifi? Did it violate the spirit, or the letter of the regulations? I've had the opposite problem, trying to make a card respect FCC regulations (ieee80211_regdom=US) while its firmware seems to have another country hardcoded. I think it would be far better to use regdom=US instead of letting the card do whatever's ok in the country the card believes it's still operating in, yet it would also "violate" FCC regulations to let me write into its firmware that it should follow US rules by default from now on. ebay + a worldwide market + "can't trust people to change the firmware" = problems I wish there was more flexibility in the drivers to correct such misbehaviors, because I believe most people want to do the right things.
crote 3y ago
Why would violating FCC regulations prevent it from being merged? There are plenty of Linux users who do not live within the jurisdiction of the FCC. Similarly, there are many regions which forbid certain spectrum use which the FCC allows. Surely it'd make way more sense to just have a locale configuration option, rather than only allowing the intersection of all radio emission rules worldwide?

csdvrx 3y ago

> to improve a driver that was buggy for many years that I hacked in a way that made it work awesome but would never be accepted upstream because it violated FCC regulations Now I want to know more! Was it a misbehaving wifi? Did it violate the spirit, or the letter of the regulations? I've had the opposite problem, trying to make a card respect FCC regulations (ieee80211_regdom=US) while its firmware seems to have another country hardcoded. I think it would be far better to use regdom=US instead of letting the card do whatever's ok in the country the card believes it's still operating in, yet it would also "violate" FCC regulations to let me write into its firmware that it should follow US rules by default from now on. ebay + a worldwide market + "can't trust people to change the firmware" = problems I wish there was more flexibility in the drivers to correct such misbehaviors, because I believe most people want to do the right things.

crote 3y ago

Why would violating FCC regulations prevent it from being merged? There are plenty of Linux users who do not live within the jurisdiction of the FCC. Similarly, there are many regions which forbid certain spectrum use which the FCC allows. Surely it'd make way more sense to just have a locale configuration option, rather than only allowing the intersection of all radio emission rules worldwide?