4 ms·

This clearly violates rule of least astonishment, however as Linus says: "we do not break userspace".

• jeffdavis 13y ago
  It would be interesting to compare how many cases would be silently fixed by such a change.
• nathancahill 13y ago
  In this case, I think the userspace is already broken, but people haven't realized their code is broken yet.
• einhverfr 13y ago
  What would happen if an API turned out to be based on a clearly incorrect and useless reading of a POSIX standard? I would think that even Linus might fix something in that case.
  • caf 13y ago
    Right, Linus's actual guideline seems to be "If no-one notices we broke backwards-compatibility, we didn't break backwards compatibility", along the lines of the tree-falls-in-the-forest saw.
• general_failure 13y ago
  Every syscall fix in kernel breaks user space in some subtle way.