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Torvalds Has Harsh Words For FreeBSD Devs

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the end-of-the-week-frustrations dept.

An anonymous reader writes "In a relatively technical discussion about the merits of Copy On Write (COW) versus a very new Linux kernel system call named vmsplice(), Linux creator Linus Torvalds had some harsh words for Mach and FreeBSD developers that utilize COW: 'I claim that Mach people (and apparently FreeBSD) are incompetent idiots. Playing games with VM is bad. memory copies are _also_ bad, but quite frankly, memory copies often have _less_ downside than VM games, and bigger caches will only continue to drive that point home.' The discussion goes on to explain how the new vmsplice() avoids this extra overhead."

1 of 571 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Wrong side of compiler by nuzak · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Actually he's been into boorish behavior from day 1 when it comes to microkernels. Namecalling between him and Tanenbaum (admittedly Tanenbaum is a bit haughty and provoking), and his slanderous accusations against microkernel researchers in general (a quote I can't find at the moment, but he basically accuses them all, as one big class, of academic fraud to procure grant money).

    The only microkernel Linus knows jack about is Mach, an ancient piece of crap, which indeed is Linus indeed calls it. It's unfortunate real-world systems were saddled with it, and it's got real performance issues, but Linus carries on about it like Mach ran over his dog or something.

    He conveniently ignores or chooses to remain ignorant of the fact that L4Linux is typically faster than Linux itself. To say nothing of the real-world success of QNX. And even L4Linux is pretty old by today's standards.

    This is all pretty typical behavior of Linus: bluster now, bone up and learn, and implement it later. He did so with SMP (saying famously that the way to do it was one Big F**ing Lock, then learning that no this wasn't such a great idea after all). Then he went on a tirade about sun's /dev/poll before learning that yes they actually didn't cheat and they did it smarter, and Linux followed.

    Ultimately, Linus and Linux come around. Sometimes he just has to vent.

    --
    Done with slashdot, done with nerds, getting a life.