Torvalds Has Harsh Words For FreeBSD Devs

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."

Comments

What?

[Malawar]

What? no, seriously? /yay mod-downs!

Debian GNU/kFreeBSD

[Douglas Simmons]

Development-wise, how much is Debian's FreeBSD port from Debian versus FreeBSD? Or are its advancements in tandem with both projects. And does either half suffer from the combination of the other?

Does he say they're dying?

[Anonymous Coward]

And, more importantly, does Netcraft confirm it?

Straight Gangsta'

[MudButt]

Pac, Biggie, Proof... How many gangstas gotta die before these turf wars end?

Brazil

[Anonymous Coward]

Brazil does nothing but export prostitutes!
Fucking country.

Linus is growing old

[imbaczek]

As much as I like Linus, he's starting to be an old fart whose only excuse for throwing insults around seems to be the fact that he's right.

I hope *I'm* wrong on this one ^^

Re:Linus is growing old

[Miniluv]

What other reason does he need? Are you trying to say that it'd be ok if he was PMS'ing and wrong, since at least PMS is a good reason to insult someone?

Re:Wrong Side of Bed?

[Bill Hayden]

Unless you put the malloc on the outside of the loop, or call free() at the end of the loop, you've got a serious memory leak there.

Re:Wrong Side of Bed?

[Anonymous Coward]

while(read < totalSize)
{
        buffer = malloc(1024);
        length = fread(buffer, 1, 1024, &file);
        read += length; //Do some stuff, but don't free the buffer!
}


I know this is almost pseudocode, but this is a memory leak. Especially if you don't ever free the buffer.

I'm not much of a coder, but I would have put the malloc() outside of the while() loop. I would also have ignored length and just done read += fread(...). But also, I would free the buffer.

Your comment violated the "postercomment" compression filter. Try less whitespace and/or less repetition. Comment aborted.

Lameness filter is lame sometimes.

Re:Microsofts answer to that

[Gorshkov]

carefull .... if the COWs with guns don't get you, the chickens in choppers will CERTAINLY dust your arse