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Wasn't just Linus. Earlier, from Theo de Raadt: > I don't think you understand the problem space well enough to come up with your own solution for it. I spent

by js2 2y ago

Wasn't just Linus. Earlier, from Theo de Raadt: > I don't think you understand the problem space well enough to come up with your own solution for it. I spent a year on this, and ship a complete system using it. You are asking such simplistic questions above it shocks me. https://lwn.net/ml/linux-kernel/95482.1697587015@cvs.openbsd.org/ https://lwn.net/ml/linux-kernel/95482.1697587015@cvs.openbsd... Via https://lwn.net/Articles/948129/ https://lwn.net/Articles/948129/

0xbadcafebee 2y ago
Not a great perspective... "It took me a year [or more] to understand this. The fact that you don't understand it shocks me." Dude, not everybody's as smart or experienced as you. Here's an opportunity to be a mentor.
- nativeit 2y ago
  > Google has no shortage of experienced developers who could have reviewed this submission before it was posted publicly, but that does not appear to have happened, with the result that a relatively inexperienced developer was put into a difficult position. Feedback on the proposal was resisted rather than listened to. The result was an interaction that pleased nobody.
  - refulgentis 2y ago
    > Google has no shortage of experienced developers who could have reviewed this submission before it was posted publicly, You'd be surprised. My understanding from folks on Chrome OS is they've already shedded most, if not all, of the most experienced old hands. (n.b. Chrome OS was absorbed by Android and development is, by and large, ceased on it according to same sources directly, and indirectly via Blind.)
- vlovich123 2y ago
  My reading of this is a lot more generous to the maintainers and a lot less sympathetic to the author than yours is. The maintainers highlighted the problems and the author came back basically with "I don't believe you so let's go with my approach to stay more general" - it's one thing to disagree, it's another to straight up not acknowledge the feedback. The author ate a lot of very senior people's time arguing instead of listening to them and learning from their experience and that was justifiably frustrating forcing much more direct feedback. The kind of mistake the author made - having to enforce at each individual syscall level instead of it being a protection on the memory itself enforced on all accesses - indicates a poor understanding of how to think about security and build security APIs which is a problem when you're proposing a security API. It's particularly impressive how misguided the patch is given that they took inspiration from the OpenBSD API implementation, changed both API & implementation, & then argued with both Linus and Theo who started Linux & OpenBSD respectively and were trying to give direct feedback about how OpenBSD is different and why it took the approach it did. Hopefully the author has taken the more forceful feedback as a learning opportunity about listening to feedback when the people giving it to you have a lot more experience. Or their team is coaching them about what went wrong now that this became so visible to learn what they got wrong. From Matthew Wilcox who is another senior Linux maintainer: > I concur with Theo & Linus. You don't know what you're doing. I think the underlying idea of mimmutable() is good, but how you've split it up and how you've implemented it is terrible. It's delivered directly and bluntly but it's not mean or personal. The author proposed a bad patch & argued from a position of ignorance.
  - jorvi 2y ago
    > The maintainers highlighted the problems and the author came back basically with "I don't believe you so let's go with my approach to stay more general" - it's one thing to disagree, it's another to straight up not acknowledge the feedback. Isn't that the Linux kernel in a nutshell? Of the top of my head I can name: - The zram maintainer that's for a few years been blocking the patches that add the zpool api to zram. This would go a long way to unifying zram and zswap in the future. - TuxOnIce being permablocked by some heels-in-sand maintainers until the kernel diverged to much and the patch writer gave up. This one would have fixed hibernation on Linux.. in other words, hibernation still sucks because of these maintainers. - Of course the trench warfare all the C-proficient maintainers are waging to chase all the Rust-in-Linux people away, lest they have to learn Rust. ~80% of CVEs are memory-related, so you could say that in say.. 10 years time, ~80% of the CVEs happening in the Linux kernel are the legacy of Ted & co.
    - vlovich123 2y ago
      You can roughly be: 1. Wrong and ignorant 2. Wrong and knowledgeable 3. Right and ignorant 4. Right and knowledgeable There's also when there's just a disagreement of opinion because you weight the tradeoffs differently, in which case there's less of a right or wrong. The main difference is that in those cases the people involved were in camps 2-4 or simply weighted tradeoffs differently. In this case the author seemed much more clearly in camp 1. Regarding the claim that "this one would have fixed hibernation on Linux" - maybe, but it's hard to evaluate a road not taken. It could have made other tradeoffs or caused other issues down the road that aren't visible to you right now because it didn't get mainlined or maybe hibernation would still have been broken. Or maybe it would have been hunky dorry. But it kind of doesn't matter because the author in this case was clearly wrong (i.e. the patch wouldn't have achieved the goal it set out to do and would have predictably caused vulnerabilities to become possible in the future as the kernel evolved). As for Rust-in-Linux, it sounds like your not actually up to date [1]. I'll forgive Ted's emotional volatility at the infamous filesystem talk as he's been much more calm about it now: > There is a need for documentation and tutorials on how to write filesystem code in idiomatic Rust. He said that he has a lot to learn; he is willing to do that, but needs help on what to learn. I'd say "trench resistance" not warfare. The Rust movement is trying to shift the daily work of ~15k developers in a mostly bazaar development model. There's going to be resistance and push back and some of it will feel unfair to the Rust folks and some will feel unfair to the C folk and both will be right. [1] https://lwn.net/Articles/991062/ https://lwn.net/Articles/991062/
- terribleperson 2y ago
  The time of the people who maintain the free and open source software we rely on is not free. From the people I've talked to, maintainers of successful projects are overworked and underappreciated. Mentorship from one of those people would be valuable, but arguing with them about the implementation of something you don't understand isn't how you get that mentorship.
  - Onavo 2y ago
    > Mentorship from one of those people would be valuable, but arguing with them about the implementation of something you don't understand isn't how you get that mentorship. Actually that's exactly how you can provoke them into explaining themselves. Too many experienced people sit in their ivory towers and basically appeal to their authority, "I wrote a kernel therefore I know everything, <insert profanity here>". There's a reason why Cunningham's Law exist, "The best way to get the right answer on the Internet is not to ask a question, it's to post the wrong answer."
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
Affric 2y ago
Thank you. That was beautiful. Demonstrated the difference in design/engineering philosophies from two of the greats.
benreesman 2y ago
You’re asking me how a watch works, let’s just try to keep an eye on the time. https://youtu.be/vkYqs9iuJqY?feature=shared&t=109 https://youtu.be/vkYqs9iuJqY?feature=shared&t=109

by js2 2y ago

0xbadcafebee 2y ago

Not a great perspective... "It took me a year [or more] to understand this. The fact that you don't understand it shocks me." Dude, not everybody's as smart or experienced as you. Here's an opportunity to be a mentor.

nativeit 2y ago
> Google has no shortage of experienced developers who could have reviewed this submission before it was posted publicly, but that does not appear to have happened, with the result that a relatively inexperienced developer was put into a difficult position. Feedback on the proposal was resisted rather than listened to. The result was an interaction that pleased nobody.
- refulgentis 2y ago
  > Google has no shortage of experienced developers who could have reviewed this submission before it was posted publicly, You'd be surprised. My understanding from folks on Chrome OS is they've already shedded most, if not all, of the most experienced old hands. (n.b. Chrome OS was absorbed by Android and development is, by and large, ceased on it according to same sources directly, and indirectly via Blind.)
vlovich123 2y ago
My reading of this is a lot more generous to the maintainers and a lot less sympathetic to the author than yours is. The maintainers highlighted the problems and the author came back basically with "I don't believe you so let's go with my approach to stay more general" - it's one thing to disagree, it's another to straight up not acknowledge the feedback. The author ate a lot of very senior people's time arguing instead of listening to them and learning from their experience and that was justifiably frustrating forcing much more direct feedback. The kind of mistake the author made - having to enforce at each individual syscall level instead of it being a protection on the memory itself enforced on all accesses - indicates a poor understanding of how to think about security and build security APIs which is a problem when you're proposing a security API. It's particularly impressive how misguided the patch is given that they took inspiration from the OpenBSD API implementation, changed both API & implementation, & then argued with both Linus and Theo who started Linux & OpenBSD respectively and were trying to give direct feedback about how OpenBSD is different and why it took the approach it did. Hopefully the author has taken the more forceful feedback as a learning opportunity about listening to feedback when the people giving it to you have a lot more experience. Or their team is coaching them about what went wrong now that this became so visible to learn what they got wrong. From Matthew Wilcox who is another senior Linux maintainer: > I concur with Theo & Linus. You don't know what you're doing. I think the underlying idea of mimmutable() is good, but how you've split it up and how you've implemented it is terrible. It's delivered directly and bluntly but it's not mean or personal. The author proposed a bad patch & argued from a position of ignorance.
- jorvi 2y ago
  > The maintainers highlighted the problems and the author came back basically with "I don't believe you so let's go with my approach to stay more general" - it's one thing to disagree, it's another to straight up not acknowledge the feedback. Isn't that the Linux kernel in a nutshell? Of the top of my head I can name: - The zram maintainer that's for a few years been blocking the patches that add the zpool api to zram. This would go a long way to unifying zram and zswap in the future. - TuxOnIce being permablocked by some heels-in-sand maintainers until the kernel diverged to much and the patch writer gave up. This one would have fixed hibernation on Linux.. in other words, hibernation still sucks because of these maintainers. - Of course the trench warfare all the C-proficient maintainers are waging to chase all the Rust-in-Linux people away, lest they have to learn Rust. ~80% of CVEs are memory-related, so you could say that in say.. 10 years time, ~80% of the CVEs happening in the Linux kernel are the legacy of Ted & co.
  - vlovich123 2y ago
    You can roughly be: 1. Wrong and ignorant 2. Wrong and knowledgeable 3. Right and ignorant 4. Right and knowledgeable There's also when there's just a disagreement of opinion because you weight the tradeoffs differently, in which case there's less of a right or wrong. The main difference is that in those cases the people involved were in camps 2-4 or simply weighted tradeoffs differently. In this case the author seemed much more clearly in camp 1. Regarding the claim that "this one would have fixed hibernation on Linux" - maybe, but it's hard to evaluate a road not taken. It could have made other tradeoffs or caused other issues down the road that aren't visible to you right now because it didn't get mainlined or maybe hibernation would still have been broken. Or maybe it would have been hunky dorry. But it kind of doesn't matter because the author in this case was clearly wrong (i.e. the patch wouldn't have achieved the goal it set out to do and would have predictably caused vulnerabilities to become possible in the future as the kernel evolved). As for Rust-in-Linux, it sounds like your not actually up to date [1]. I'll forgive Ted's emotional volatility at the infamous filesystem talk as he's been much more calm about it now: > There is a need for documentation and tutorials on how to write filesystem code in idiomatic Rust. He said that he has a lot to learn; he is willing to do that, but needs help on what to learn. I'd say "trench resistance" not warfare. The Rust movement is trying to shift the daily work of ~15k developers in a mostly bazaar development model. There's going to be resistance and push back and some of it will feel unfair to the Rust folks and some will feel unfair to the C folk and both will be right. [1] https://lwn.net/Articles/991062/ https://lwn.net/Articles/991062/
terribleperson 2y ago
The time of the people who maintain the free and open source software we rely on is not free. From the people I've talked to, maintainers of successful projects are overworked and underappreciated. Mentorship from one of those people would be valuable, but arguing with them about the implementation of something you don't understand isn't how you get that mentorship.
- Onavo 2y ago
  > Mentorship from one of those people would be valuable, but arguing with them about the implementation of something you don't understand isn't how you get that mentorship. Actually that's exactly how you can provoke them into explaining themselves. Too many experienced people sit in their ivory towers and basically appeal to their authority, "I wrote a kernel therefore I know everything, <insert profanity here>". There's a reason why Cunningham's Law exist, "The best way to get the right answer on the Internet is not to ask a question, it's to post the wrong answer."

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

Affric 2y ago

Thank you. That was beautiful. Demonstrated the difference in design/engineering philosophies from two of the greats.

benreesman 2y ago

You’re asking me how a watch works, let’s just try to keep an eye on the time. https://youtu.be/vkYqs9iuJqY?feature=shared&t=109 https://youtu.be/vkYqs9iuJqY?feature=shared&t=109