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Linux Kernel Code Humor
An anonymous reader writes "This article points to some pretty funny comments and code in the Linux kernel. From colorful metaphors, to burning printers, to happy meals... A recursive search through the entire code base reveals some interesting language. Is all code like this?"
Yes.
Haven't been working long in the real world, eh?
... hi bingo
The best code comment I heard about (in a discussion about code commenting, I believe) was something like this: /*** DRUNK -- FIX LATER! ***/
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Something forms itself from the silent void of the empty mailing lists and the noisy chaos of the crowded mailing lists. It shapes and protects us, it entertains and challenges us, it aids us in our journey through the ether world of software. It is mysterious; it is at once source code and yet object code. I do not know the name, thus I will call it the Tao of Linux.
If the Tao is great, then the box is stable. If the box is stable, then the server is secure. If the server is secure, then the data is safe. If the data is safe, then the users are happy.
In the beginning there was chaos in Unix.
Tanenbaum gave birth to MINIX. MINIX did not have the Tao.
MINIX gave birth to Linux 0.1 and it had promise.
Linux gave birth to v1.3 and it was good.
v1.3 gave birth to v2.0 and it was better.
Linux has evolved greatly from its distant cousins of the old. Linux is embodied by the Tao.
The wise user is told about the Tao and contributes to it. The average user is told about the Tao and compiles it. The foolish user is told about the Tao and laughs and asks who needs it.
If it were not for laughter, there would be no Tao.
Wisdom leads to good code, but experience leads to good use of that code.
The master Cox once dreamed that he was a Kernel. When he awoke he exclaimed: "I don't know whether I am Cox dreaming that I am a Kernel, or a Kernel dreaming that I am Cox!"
The master Linus then said: "The Tao envelopes you. You shall create great code for Linux."
"On the contrary," said Cox, "The Tao has already created the code, I will only have to find it and write it down."
A master was explaining the nature of the Tao to one of his students:
"Is the Tao in the VM subsystem?" he asked. "Yes," replied the master.
"Is the Tao in the scheduler?" he queried again. "The Tao is in the scheduler."
"Is the Tao even in the modules?". "It is even in the modules," said the master.
"Is the Tao in the Low-Latency Patch?"
The master frowned and was silent for much time.
"You fail to understand the Tao. Go away."
The Tao is the yin and the yang. It is the good and the evil, it is everything and yet it is nothing, it is the beginning and the end.
The Tao was there at the kernel compile, and it will be there when the kernel panics.
A novice user once asked a master: "Why compile in C when C++ is more popular?"
"Why a monolythic kernel when Mach is more popular?"
"And why use ReiserFS when ext2 is more popular?"
The master sighed and replied: "Why run Unix when NT is more popular?"
The user was enlightened.
A frustrated user once asked a master: "My kernel has panicked, should I post to lkml?"
"No," replied the master, "You will only bother the Tao."
"Should I rm -rf?"
"No, you will have wasted the Tao's time."
"Well should I search the web?"
"You will search for all eternity," said the master.
"Perhaps I should try FreeBSD?"
"Then you will have disgraced the Tao."
"I suppose I could try gdb," said the user.
The master smiled and replied: "Then you will have made the Tao stronger."
A stubborn user once told a master: "I run version 2.2. I always have, and I always will."
The master replied: "You are foolish and do not understand the Tao. The Tao is dynamic and ever changing. Linux strives for the perfection that is the Tao. It flows from version to version with peace."
"So my Linux does not have the Tao, so what?" said the foolish user. "Oh your Linux is of the Tao," said the master. "However, the Tao of Linux follows the Tao of the C library. One day the C library will change, and your Linux will be left behind." The user was silent.
An angry user once yelled at a master:
"My Linux has panicked! What lousy software it is, I hate it so!"
"You are insulting the Tao," said the master. "The Tao is everywhere bringing order to hundreds of networks, aiding thousands of users, and fighting that of which we call the 'lame.' Do not disrespect the Tao; however, the Tao will forgive you."
"I apologize," said the user, "And I will be more forgiving the next time the Tao fails me."
"The Tao has not failed you, it is you that has failed the Tao," said the master. "The Tao is perfect."
The Tao decides if a kernel shall compile, or if it shall abort.
The Tao decides if a kernel shall boot, or if it shall freeze.
The Tao decides if a kernel shall run, or if it shall panic.
But, the Tao does not decide if a box will have no hardware failures. That is a mystery to everyone.
A young master once approached an old master: "I have a LUG for Linux help. But, I fail to answer my students' problems; they are above me."
The master replied: "Have you taught them of the Tao?" he asked. "How it brings together man and software, yet how it distances them apart; how if flows throughout Linux and transcends its essence?"
"No," exclaimed the apprentice, "These people cannot even get the source untarred."
"Oh, said the master, "In that case, tell them to RTFM."
A master watched as an ambitious user reconstructed his Linux.
"I shall make every bit encrypted," the user said. "I shall use 2048 bit keys, three different algorithms, and make multiple passes."
The master replied: "I think it is unwise."
"Why?" asked the user. "Will my encryption harm the mighty Tao, which gives Linux life and creates the balance between kernel and processes? The mighty Tao, which is the thread that binds the modules and links them with the core? The mighty Tao, which safely guides the TCP/IP packets to and from the network card?"
"No," said the master, "It will hog too much cpu."
The core is like the part of the mind that is static. It is programmed at a child's creation and cannot be changed unless a new child is made; unless a new kernel is compiled.
The modules are like the part of the mind that is dynamic. It is reprogrammed every time one learns new knowledge; every time one learns better code.
One is yin, the other yang. Each is nothing without the other.
A novice came to lkml and inquired to all the masters there: "I wish to become a master. Must I memorize the Linux header files?"
"No," replied a master.
"Must I submit code to Bitkeeper?"
"No," replied the master.
"Must I meditate daily and dedicate my life to Linux?"
"No," replied the master again.
"Must I go on a quest to ponder the meaning of the Tao?"
"No. A master is nothing more than a student who knows something of which he can teach to other students."
The novice understood.
And thus said the master:
"It is the way of the Tao."
A user came to a master who had great status in lkml. The user asked the master: "Which is easier: implementing new features to the kernel or documenting them?"
"Implementing new features," replied the master.
The confused user then exclaimed:
"Surely it is easier to write a few sentences in the man page than it is to write pages of code without error?"
"Not so," said the master. "When coding, the Tao of Linux opens my eyes wide and allows me to see beyond the code, to let the source flow from my fingers, to implement without flaw. When documenting, however, all I have to work with is a C in high school English."
He who compiles from the stable tree is stubborn
and unwilling to change, but is guaranteed reliability.
He who compiles from the current tree is wise but perhaps too conformist, but is guaranteed steadiness.
He who compiles from the unstable tree is adventurous and is guaranteed new innovations: some good, some bad.
He who compiles straight from Bitkeeper is brave but guaranteed turbulence.
They are all of the Tao. One shall respect the old, and debug the new; none shall argue over which is greatest.
There once was a user who scripted in Perl: "Look at what I have to work with here," he said to a master of core, "My code is interpreted dynamically, the syntax is unique and simple, I have sockets, strings, arrays, and everything I could ever need. Why don't you stop meddling in C and come join me?"
The C programmer described his reasoning to the scripter: "Script is to C as ebonics is to Latin. If the scripter does not grow beyond that of which he scripts, he will surely [die]. Besides, without C, how can there be script?"
The scripter was enlightened, and the two became close friends.
Does naming a temporary boolean variable SchroedingersCat constitute humor?
If so then, yes, programmers do have humor. (Atleast this one does...)
"GNU's not Unix....it's Linux" / Kami "kokamomi" Petersen
Is it true that there somewhere in the kernelcode is a comment by Linus saying:
"//I wonder why this works"?
"GNU's not Unix....it's Linux" / Kami "kokamomi" Petersen
Around the middle of July last year the drive in my web server (a 10 year old 250mb SCSI) died. The first I knew about it was an error along the lines of "device is bolixed".
:)
It's about the most accurate error message I've seen yet - within half an hour it just wouldn't spin
a grrl & her server
I've seen code from one of our vendors with comments such as "whoever wrote this should be shot. but it was probably me. no time to fix it." He both admitted it was sketchy code and said it like that - and then we bought it.
I've been known to "talk to myself" in my comments, but I do keep it PG-rated or cleaner. Sometimes at a function exit point you'll see "all done, have a nice day".
Only the best code written by the coolest people in a great working enviroment is like that.
I think that's the real reason MS won't release code. It isn't that the code sucks and they'd be emabrassed ( because that cat is already out of the bag), it's that it would reveal what a dull lot the lot of them were and make it hard to recruit.
I bet you won't find *one* "Fuck Clippy" comment in the whole code base, and you know they *want* to say it.
Damned marketroids won't let people have *any* fun.
KFG
My personal favorite is the "Hardware On Drugs" message.
/usr/src/linux
cd
grep -r drugs *
linux-2.4.19/drivers/net/wan/dscc4.c:
printk(KERN_INFO) "%s: hardware on drugs!\n", dev->name);
Karma: Not Particularly Funny.
Bill Paul, the guy who coded the Realtek 8139 driver put a very funny comment:
* The RealTek 8139 PCI NIC redefines the meaning of 'low end.' This is
* probably the worst PCI ethernet controller ever made, with the possible
* exception of the FEAST chip made by SMC. The 8139 supports bus-master
* DMA, but it has a terrible interface that nullifies any performance
* gains that bus-master DMA usually offers.
*
someone talking about "Kernel Klink" embedded somewhere?
Of course not - we know NOTH-ING!
I want to drag this out as long as possible. Bring me my protractor.
One can be very colorful with variable names too.
...
I remember my high school computer teacher made us make a pixel drawing program. Part of the specs was to be able to toggle between draw and move mode.
The natural variable names were...
PenIsUp and PenIsDown
Tournament Management Online &
Invoicing, Time Tracking, Reporting
I was compiling Perl 5.8 when I found these funny little tidbits:
./Configure:
./configure stages of compiling the source.
From Perl 5.8.0's
"Checking to see how your cpp does stuff like catenate tokens...
Oh! Smells like ANSI's been here.
We can catify or stringify, separately or together!"
"You have POSIX termios.h... good!"
Gimp 1.2.3 was no less immune:
checking for intelligent life... not found
Both were found during the
"There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death." Proverbs 16:25 (NKJV)
Does naming a temporary boolean variable SchroedingersCat constitute humor?
Oh, yea. That's just too funny.
If your job as a programmer ever goes under, you can always do standup.
And colleague and I where working a client E450 when we saw some funny ASCII art in /var/log/messages. At first, we believed that the machine got owned and the cracker was making fun of us. A little grepping later we found it in arch/sparc64/kernel/traps.c die_if_kernel() (around line 1450 for 2.4.18). I'd like to post the snippet, but the lameness filter refuse to let me do so. Go see for yourself.
BTW, kerneltrap.org comment posting system seem borked ... it ate my post !
:wq
Compare this to the boss I had that told me I wasn't allowed to call a variable "temp" (for temperature), because other programmers on the team might misunderstand and think that's a temporary variable.
www.HearMySoulSpeak.com
I ran across this gem awhile ago, been saving it as a text clipping on my desktop for years now waiting for the perfect moment to post:
- Shane Smith <Shane.F.Smith@Healthnet.com> on proper code indentation, in comp.os.vms
All editorial writers ever do is come down from the hill after the battle is over and shoot the wounded.
Yes, I think most all code has a lot of cursing in it.
Someone in the group I used to be in at MIT's Lab for Computer Science used to grep out all the fucks and shits before she'd do a release of our TCP for V6 UNIX.
While working for a loony British midget at Cray Computer Corporation, I put the declaration "short volatile *VP;" into the compiler's optimization phase.
"Skill shows through where genius wears thin." -Wittgenstein || Religion: uniting aviation and architecture.
and one from the slackware adduser script..
i also remember a good one in the enlightenment configure script though i dont have it saved .. something about searching the -lfridge for lager ;)
While neither in Linux nor in the the kernel, there is some humor in shutdown.c (/usr/src/sbin/shutdown) in both FreeBSD and OpenBSD. The function die_you_gravy_sucking_pig_dog gave me a good laugh when I saw it the first time.
Here's my favourite part of the Blender source:
/* Do you understand the implication? Do you? */
#ifdef WIN32
static int is_a_really_crappy_nvidia_card(void) {
static int well_is_it= -1;
if (well_is_it==-1)
well_is_it= (strcmp((char*) glGetString(GL_VENDOR), "NVIDIA Corporation") == 0);
return well_is_it;
}
#endif
from my old job at a dot com I was instructed to make the website "self-maintaining". I was laid off on a friday but was told I had to spend the next week doing this. I remember one of the last scripts I worked on had something like this:
if ( $get_out_while_you_can == $or_they_will_fuck_you ) {
$with_a_cold_aluminum_baseball_bat = 1;
}
and
if ( $this_company_is_run_by_morons == $i_hate_them_all ) {
die();
}
Also the ammount of 'shit' and 'fuck' words totally blew me off :)
either this guy meant to write "totally blew me AWAY" or he really needs a girlfriend
I wonder why nobody has mentioned this:
./net/core/netfilter.c
% sed -n 2,5p
* Heavily influenced by the old firewall.c by David Bonn and Alan Cox.
*
* Thanks to Rob `CmdrTaco' Malda for not influencing this code in any
* way.
Several years ago, there were three of us, all working (well, "working") for our university's solar car team. Most of the telemetry code was written by one of the other guys (whose basement I'm now writing this from), and somewhere mid-project his girlfriend royally screwed him over. As we now tell people, it wasn't that she was a raving bitch, it was just that she really, really liked guys. All of them, everywhere, personally and intimately. :)
:CRC16UpperCalc before the girlfriend disaster to things like :LivsABitchDieDieDie afterwards. Made for some very funny looks back at the old code, but rather frustrating for anybody to debug. After all, how was I supposed to know the difference between the functionality of one with three "die"s and one with four "die"s. And yes, there was a difference, and yes, he knew exactly what each did.
:)
Anyway, getting on with the story, after that event, he cranked out phenominal amounts of microcontroller code - all very intricate, clever, and good (from an engineer's point of view, not necessarily from a comp-sci view). However, written in assembly, he was forced to regularly come up with line labels for jumps in the code. These rapidly devolved from useful things like
Lousy maintainability, but it was microcontroller code that nobody would ever again touch. Or, based on what we know of the teams after us, even understand.
#endif
This text is here because the above code triggers the lame filter. You know, that thing they put in the slash code to force crapflooders to be creative.
The cake is a pie
arch/i386/kernel/dmi_scan.c
[...]
/*
* Check for clue free BIOS implementations who use
* the following QA technique
*
* [ Write BIOS Code ]<------
* | ^
* < Does it Compile >----N--
* |Y ^
* < Does it Boot Win98 >-N--
* |Y
* [Ship It]
*
I work in a professional software house, and a while back I write a utility to trawl through some source code for an application and extract the comments. The ratio of 'practical' comments to frustration-venting, sideswiping and humour ran at about 50:50.
/* Trust me...I know what I'm doing */
/* don't trust me...I may not know what he was doing */
One member of the team has a reputation for doing useful but wacky things, and most of examples of his code were prefixed with
At some point a bug-fix had been applied by a junior programmer, prefixed by
See here and my sig.
...the entire OS is the joke.
Not too much in FreeBSD running the same tests. (Yes, I have nothing better to do today, thank you). (Results white-space edited)
/usr/src/sys/
/usr/src/sys/ tree has many more results, but alot of them come out of the fortune files. No funny stories I could find, but I'm sure someone else can. =)
Under
$ egrep -ir "( fuck)|( shit)" *
alpha/tc/esp.c: * Things are seriously fucked up.
dev/sym/sym_hipd.c: * brain-deaded stuff that makes shit.
i386/i386/math_emu.h: * structure to 12 bytes which breaks things in math_emulate.c. Shit. I
Doing it outside the
fs/reiserfs/inode.c: /* crap, we are writing to a hole */
drivers/usb/uhci.c: * is just crap, written by a committee.
net/ipv4/tcp_input.c: /* Old crap is replaced with new one.
drivers/sbus/audio/cs4231.c: * how this crap gets set.
drivers/net/3c501.c: Do not purchase this card, even as a joke. It's performance is horrible
net/ipv4/ip_sockglue.c: I have no idea, how it will masquearde or NAT them (it is joke, joke :-))
net/ipv4/tcp_input.c: * Funny. This algorithm seems to be very broken.
At a previous life I was maintaining a text app built in OS/2 and hit the end-of-line key in Brief (my editor of choice back then) and noticed I was waaaayyyy past column 80. I started hunting around and found that a long-gone programmer had put in some text messages past column 80 that wouldn't be casually found.
They flashed by very quickly in our UI and said "Xxxx deserves a raise." "Xxxx does great work." "Xxxx should be a lead."
Of course, as those message boxes weren't causing the bug, I left them alone.
"First, do no harm."
arch/i386/kernel/mtrr.c:1088:/* Some BIOS's are fucked and don't set all MTRRs the same! */
:971: <title>The Fucked Up Sparc</title>
/* task can fuck it up GTL */
/* This card is _fucking_ hot... */
/* Be careful, we could really get fucked during synchronous
/* Be careful, we could really get fucked during synchronous
/* Fuck me plenty... */
/* Ugly, ugly fucker. */
/* Ugly, ugly fucker. */
:-)
/* James M doesn't say fuck enough. */
/* This is fucking braindead. There is NO WAY of doing this without
/* Grrr... SACK. Fuck me even harder. Don't want to fix it on the
Documentation/DocBook/kernel-locking.tmpl:65 0: If you don't see why, please stay the fuck away from my code.
Documentation/DocBook/kernel-locking.tmpl
drivers/cdrom/sbpcd.c:4927: blkdev_dequeue_request(req);
drivers/char/drm/drmP.h:690:extern int DRM(release_fuck)(struct inode *inode, struct file *filp);
drivers/ide/cmd640.c:16: * These chips are basically fucked by design, and getting this driver
drivers/net/macsonic.c:166: fuck did SONIC_BUS_SCALE come from, and what was it supposed
drivers/net/sunhme.c:1014:/* Only Sun can take such nice parts and fuck up the programming interface
drivers/net/sunhme.c:2086:
drivers/scsi/NCR53C9x.c:1770: * how bad the target and/or ESP fucks things up.
drivers/scsi/NCR53C9x.c:2690:
drivers/scsi/esp.c:2575: * how bad the target and/or ESP fucks things up.
drivers/scsi/esp.c:2663: * phase things. We don't want to fuck directly with
drivers/scsi/esp.c:3357:
drivers/scsi/qlogicpti.h:76:/* Am I fucking pedantic or what? */
drivers/sound/aci.c:161:/* The four ACI command types are fucked up. [-:
fs/binfmt_aout.c:313:
fs/jffs/intrep.c:2983: don't fuck up. This is why we have
include/linux/netfilter_ipv4/ipt_limit.h:1 8:
include/linux/netfilter_ipv6/ip6t_limit.h:18 :
lib/vsprintf.c:9: * Wirzenius wrote this portably, Torvalds fucked it up
net/core/netfilter.c:440:
net/ipv4/netfilter/ip_conntrack_core.c:1138:
net/ipv4/netfilter/ip_nat_helper.c:249:
net/ipv4/netfilter/ip_nat_snmp_basic.c:1028 : * (And this is the fucking 'basic' method).
net/ipv4/netfilter/ipt_limit.c:8: * Alexey is a fucking genius?
net/ipv6/netfilter/ip6t_limit.c:8: * Alexey is a fucking genius?
Note to M1-ers: a curt but otherwise insightful message is not "Flamebait" or "Troll".
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
while (e_coyote)
/* code goes here */
{
}
if( SchroedingersCat == Dead ){
echo "Naughty physicist, you must have looked";
} else {
echo "Well what's the point of the experiment if you don't see what happens?";
}
Not in the kernel, but ... (and this was in Perl code, so, make your own inferences):
# SUB-PEN.
# Of post-Soviet-Russian variety, with Chechens and a whole bunch of
# paintable action figures so you can recreate your very own news
# broadcast! Parents, dare you deny your children this fabulous
# opportunity of becoming journalists? Too much caffine has been had.
Score:-1, Funny
Just reminded me of what my colleague put together yesterday:
..... from ... ....
:-)
select
where status in ('S','A','N','E')
It took him quite some time to find out why I rolled on the floor
(S -soon finished, A - active, N - new, E - error, if you ask)
Hahaha, melts in your PC, not in your hand...
I had a programming instructor in college who taught programming in C on 2 different platforms... our class was working on winblows boxes while the other class worked on some UNIX variant... she gave the same assignment to each class, however due to the differences between the two environments the results came out slightly different (neither one was "wrong" per say... just different spacing on an output file) however the instructor refused to allow for these differences and was grading the assignment by simply comparing the output file of the program with one from her program writen in the other environment. this resulted in many comments in the code in our class allong the lines of "adjustment because our instructor can't tell windows from unix"
or "adjustment to make my program wrong... but the same wrong as the instructor's program"
funnily enough nobody lost marks on any of those comments.
"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
In a CS class I took in High School, the teacher was running a little program on the projector with a prompt for a first and last name. One of my classmates raised his hand and suggested "Last name 'Hunt' , First name 'Mike'".
Attempting to conceal our laughter, we watched as the clueless teacher repeated the name aloud, then entered it into the program. He wondered why the whole class seemed to be laughing, and whether it had anything to do with this "Mike" -- one intrepid classmate told him that it was a friend of ours who had been kicked out of our school some years ago. The teacher then proceeded to use the same name in the next few iterations of the program.
Guess it just goes to show that teachers think on a different level than their students.
http://cltracker.net -- powerful craigslist multi-city search
At the company I work for, one of the main components of our main software package will run into a little bit of a problem and throw the following into the event log (Windows): "Screw you guys, I'm going home." Always a fun time when a customer calls for support, you tell them to read any errors in the event log and have them read that to you. Most of them tend to like it, in a frightened sort of way.
"Nature doesn't care how smart you are. You can still be wrong." - Richard Feynman