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Linux Kernel Developer Declares VirtualBox Driver "Crap"

Posted by Unknown on from the not-all-code-is-created-equal dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Linux kernel developers have decided to mark the VirtualBox kernel driver as tainted crap for the significant number of problems this open-source driver has caused. The VirtualBox kernel driver reportedly causes memory corruption and other problems. With the driver being flagged as tainted crap, bug reports caused by the driver will be taken less seriously."

62 of 357 comments (clear)

  1. Can that tag ... by yelvington · · Score: 3, Funny

    Can that tag be applied to users, too?

    1. Re:Can that tag ... by MachDelta · · Score: 2, Insightful

      My intro CS prof always told us that "The first rule of programming is.... the user is an idiot."

      And so far that rule has served me well. :)

    2. Re:Can that tag ... by PolygamousRanchKid+ · · Score: 4, Funny

      "User Error: Please replace user, and try again."

      My favorite error message.

      --
      Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
    3. Re:Can that tag ... by Darinbob · · Score: 4, Insightful

      The second rule is that the programmer is an idiot, especially if they don't believe in the second rule.

    4. Re:Can that tag ... by MachDelta · · Score: 3, Informative

      Sort of. The second rule was "You aren't nearly as clever as you think you are." Implying that you should always be trying to use tools/libraries/examples/asking_for_help rather than writing everything on your own in the dark. Because the alternative to following this rule was a fun little acronym my prof liked to use: "BFAI" - Brute Force And Ignorance. "You can solve anything with BFAI! But it's probably going to suck. Others will laugh at you."

      I like that rule too. :)

    5. Re:Can that tag ... by Jah-Wren+Ryel · · Score: 4, Insightful

      My intro CS prof always told us that "The first rule of programming is.... the user is an idiot."

      He's wrong. Totally, 180 degrees, wrong.

      Users know what they want. They may not know all the of steps to get there, and they usually don't know all of the implications and side-effects of those steps. But they do know where they want to end up. It's the software's job to help them get there, in fact that is the one and only job of software. When a user screws up the root cause is a failure of the software to help them take the correct steps to accomplish their goals.

      One might argue that there is no practical difference between a user that makes a mistake because they are an idiot and a user that makes a mistake because the application didn't help them enough. But there is a huge difference - you can't fix an idiot, but you can fix your software.

      I'm not saying it's easy, in fact user interface stuff is really hard. Which, I think is one of the reasons a lot of developers take the attitude of your prof -- it is so much easier to put the responsibility somewhere else because then the developer is only responsible for "idiot-proofing" their software rather than the much harder job of designing it to enable the user.

      --
      When information is power, privacy is freedom.
    6. Re:Can that tag ... by Sprouticus · · Score: 4, Insightful

      My intro CS prof always told us that "The first rule of programming is.... the user is an idiot."

      He's wrong. Totally, 180 degrees, wrong.

      Users know what they want..

      Whoah, let's just stop right there. In what universe do you live in that users know what they want. Side effects and complexity aside, I have never seen a project (infrastructure OR coding) where the users didnt come in halfway through and ask for things to change because they did not understand their own damn requirements.

      I have seen business process people actually break down and start yelling on the phone because Suzie and Tom insist that they said the EXACT oppisite of what they really said during the vetting of the processes to be built into the ERP software. I have personally lost sleep because a user changed the requirements for the sizing of a data warehouse a week before go live..

      Users ARE idiots. So are developers and administrators, but at least most of us realize it and admit to it.

    7. Re:Can that tag ... by Yo+Grark · · Score: 2

      I resemble that comment, and let me counter yours with real life things that happen at my company.

      It starts off with a requirement. Now, whether this requirement is real or not, is depending on who's asking for it, and if it contributes to sustained profitability in its execution.

      Then you start to dig into it and ask users what they want. See what happened? It went from a need to a want when you start asking users more details.

      Who's fault is that? No-one's. It's human nature to take requirements further to get more work done. Are users idiots? Yes. Are developers oblivious to a users need? Yes, but that's the BA's fault for not translating the two.

      So before everyone gets it into their heads this is a flame war between user and developer, here's when you can properly apply your logic.

      User gets a new piece of software, it doesn't do what they want, developer is an idiot.
      User gets input into a new piece of software and asks for things that less than 1 % of users want but take 80% of developers time, user is an idiot.

      BA's are always idiots for getting it always wrong.

      Now with that said, I should give props to the ACTUALLY good BA's out there. The ones that anticipate need, the ones that can head off compromise before the scope creep, the ones that keep users in the loop and continually garner true feedback on needs (because like everything, needs change) and can put their foot down on what's possible and what's needed vs what's wanted and what's a waste.

      We're all idiots in another persons eyes, it's just a matter of who you talk to, and when.

      Yo Grark

      --
      Canadian Bred with American Buttering
    8. Re:Can that tag ... by ATMAvatar · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Problem is, you are the professional software developer, the user isn't. The user is a professional whatever they are. If they are not good at their job, you can call them idiots. If they are not good at stating software requirements, that's your problem.

      You must be a user :)

      All joking aside, the user is the domain expert. The user may be a professional teacher, or doctor, or architect, or whatever. A developer cannot possibly determine what a good teaching or medical or CAD program should do inside a vacuum. In order for a program to be a success, the users' goals must be extracted somehow and requirements formed from them.

      The problem is: getting the user to effectively communicate their goals is hard. Most of the time, users don't even really know what their real goals are, and when they do, they often times express them not as goals, but as ways to achieve that goal.

      One of the largest reasons why agile has become so popular is that users only truly know what they don't want.

      Sometimes the user gets too specific with the requirements, and ends up slipping in details that make the function less desirable. When discussing the requirements, though, they will absolutely insist they want it exactly the way they described. It isn't until you hand them an app that does it that the user finally realizes they don't like it that way after all. If you're lucky, users will notice it right away and get it changed early in the process. If you're unlucky, they won't notice until full roll-out of your product. If you're especially unlucky, they won't ever fully notice the problem - they will just end up hating your product for reasons they cannot really put their finger on.

      Other times, users will come up with what they believe to be a really great idea for something fresh and new they think they want. It will be something they have never had before, but they are convinced it will revolutionize their lives. In some cases, things end up like the overly-detailed feature - it kinda does what the user wants, but maybe not 100% the way they want, or it is something they will use and brings value, but doesn't quite get them all the way to their real goal. Other times, they will take one look at the prototype or finished feature and realize that it was really a dumb idea after all.

      In a true antithesis of impossible requirements there are other times when a user will overlook something because they don't even realize what is possible.

      You mean if you scan through our records for the last few years, you can extrapolate out when we'll need to buy our supplies? Great! Now we can more effectively plan our budgets. If we scan our billing system's log files, you mean we can find all cases where our transactions from the Foo system have been dropped? You just saved us hundreds of thousands of dollars of lost charges!

      It is the business analyst's job to try and direct the users in a way to best gather requirements, sure. Unless you want to require all developers become experts not only in their field, but also in their users' professions, there is still quite a bit of responsibility on the users to figure out what it is they want.

      --
      "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
    9. Re:Can that tag ... by voidphoenix · · Score: 2

      Whoah, let's just stop right there. In what universe do you live in that users know what they want. Side effects and complexity aside, I have never seen a project (infrastructure OR coding) where the users didnt come in halfway through and ask for things to change because they did not understand their own damn requirements.

      That was the development team's failure, not the users'. The dev team didn't understand the users' needs and set to work fulfilling the wrong "damn requirements."

      I have seen business process people actually break down and start yelling on the phone because Suzie and Tom insist that they said the EXACT oppisite of what they really said during the vetting of the processes to be built into the ERP software. I have personally lost sleep because a user changed the requirements for the sizing of a data warehouse a week before go live..

      Then the requirement was wrong from the onset.

      Users ARE idiots. So are developers and administrators, but at least most of us realize it and admit to it.

      If the dev is letting the user set the requirements and then calling the user an idiot, then the dev doesn't realize where the problem is. The dev is an idiot and neither realizes it nor admits to it.

      Part of the job of the dev team is to understand the purpose and needs of the user. Only with that understanding can the devs properly determine how technology can fulfill the needs and help accomplish the purpose. Only with that understanding can the actual requirements be set. Only with that understanding can the technology be built. And only with that understanding can the product be properly vetted to validate that it fulfills the needs. Note that last one. I didn't say fulfills the requirements. The requirements are an intermediate stage and part of the technical side of the development process. In the end, the technology is supposed to fulfill the users' needs. Anything short of this is a failure of the process.

      --
      Excuse me, wtf r u doin?
  2. wonderful by pak9rabid · · Score: 3, Informative

    I wonder if this has anything to do with this problem.

  3. Slashdot Readers Declare Articles "Crap" by Anpheus · · Score: 5, Funny

    An anonymous coward writes

    "Slashdot readers have decided to label recent articles as tainted crap for significant journalistic flaws. These articles reportedly lack substance, appear to be written by a child, and have other problems. With Slashdot articles being flagged as tainted crap, they will be taken less seriously by their readers."

    1. Re:Slashdot Readers Declare Articles "Crap" by sstamps · · Score: 4, Informative

      It is not possible for /. articles to be taken less seriously.

      --
      -SS "Teach the ignorant, care for the dumb, and punish the stupid."
    2. Re:Slashdot Readers Declare Articles "Crap" by Samantha+Wright · · Score: 2

      Tried it. The usual response is "Slashdot is that way =>". They know.

      --
      Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
  4. They have access to the source... by emag · · Score: 4, Insightful

    ...so instead of just complaining, they could fix it and offer the patch back to Oracle.

    I do believe that people who complain about problems in the Linux kernel and other open source products are often told to do just that. Why expect others to do as you say, if you won't do the same?

    --
    "The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule." --H.L. Mencken
    1. Re:They have access to the source... by DaveV1.0 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      You do understand you are making his point for him, right?

      So, explain again why users should use FLOSS instead closed-source when they have "better things to work on than someone else's code" and can buy something that works?

      --
      There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
    2. Re:They have access to the source... by Jonner · · Score: 5, Insightful

      ...so instead of just complaining, they could fix it and offer the patch back to Oracle.

      I do believe that people who complain about problems in the Linux kernel and other open source products are often told to do just that. Why expect others to do as you say, if you won't do the same?

      I think you have it exactly backward. It's reasonable to tell someone to fix something himself if he wants it fixed. The people marking the Virtualbox driver as "crap" probably have no interest in using it themselves. The reason for the tag is to avoid being bothered by other people who want it fixed. Now, the Linux developers who don't care about the driver can more easily tell people who do want it fixed to do so themselves or bitch to Oracle, which seems entirely reasonable.

    3. Re:They have access to the source... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Bingo! This is my biggest single gripe with FLOSS developers/projects in the nearly 15+ years I've used such software. The arrogance of developers to say, "It's open source -- go fix it yourself" is just astonishing, and they don't begin to see the problem. In fact, I saw an exchange exactly like this regarding a very popular e-book reader/conversion program. Some user asked why the top and bottom page margin settings were ignored when converting to PDF format, and the response was that no one cares about PDF format, and the person should grab the source and fix it himself.

      The bottom line is that when developers say that they know there's almost zero chance the person will actually do it and fork the project. It's nothing more than a euphemism for, "Go the fuck away and let me play with my toy."

    4. Re:They have access to the source... by c++0xFF · · Score: 2

      I think that by declaring the VirtualBox driver to be "tainted crap" they've basically said that it's not worth fixing, or at least that fixing it right would be a large undertaking.

      If you're willing to put in the time, I'm sure everybody involved would be grateful ... just don't expect it to be a quick fix.

    5. Re:They have access to the source... by MikeBabcock · · Score: 2

      Because not everyone's a coder, and not being a coder doesn't preclude you from having requests or needs.

      I'm sick and tired of the 'show me the code' mantra even as a coder. I write software for a living and I know what it means to pick up a piece of code I've never worked on before and try to find a bug. I've done it with device drivers and regular software. Digi's serial board drivers gave me a headache one year.

      Picking up random pieces of code to fix an error is just asking for problems; aside from the time requirements, there's the real possibility of introducing new bugs due to lack of familiarity.

      In a large software project, it makes very little sense to waste one person's 4 hours working on a bug fix when a regular maintainer could've done it in 15 minutes. Hypothetical, but often true in my experience.

      --
      - Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
    6. Re:They have access to the source... by TheRaven64 · · Score: 2

      Maybe people would be more willing to put effort into Linux drivers if they didn't keep moving the goalposts by changing the driver APIs. I notice that the OS X and Windows ports of VirtualBox don't seem to have these problems. I've only run FreeBSD as a guest, but apparently it works well as a VirtualBox host too...

      --
      I am TheRaven on Soylent News
    7. Re:They have access to the source... by Grishnakh · · Score: 2

      The only people who care about changing APIs are people who want to make proprietary drivers. The Linux Kernel devs don't care about those people (companies). Making Linux drivers isn't any different from any other OS, except that when you're done you submit it to the kernel for inclusion. After that, the kernel devs do the maintenance for you, fixing things if there's any API changes.

    8. Re:They have access to the source... by Grishnakh · · Score: 2

      The arrogance of developers to say, "It's open source -- go fix it yourself" is just astonishing

      How is that arrogant? They've given you software for free; you should be grateful. You can make suggestions if you want, but if they don't feel your suggestions are worthy of their time to implement, then you should be the one to fix it, since that feature is so important to you. If you don't like it, go use some other software, if you can even find any that does exactly what you want. Just because those developers made some Free software available to you doesn't mean they're obligated to be at your beck and call for every weird feature you think would be cool.

    9. Re:They have access to the source... by Grishnakh · · Score: 2

      Well in 2011, Oracle is the new boogeyman. They love to embrace, extend and extinguish open source projects - far more so than Microsoft.

      Um, I don't think so, unless I'm missing something. Oracle still supports several open-source projects, such as OpenOffice. They haven't "extinguished" them, they haven't made them closed-source, they're still there. The problem is that they do a half-ass job of supporting their open-source projects. That's still better than MS, who hasn't stopped trying to extinguish OSS and certainly doesn't produce its own significant open-source projects. The only reason that MS isn't the boogeyman they used to be is because they just don't wield the power they once did; they're slowly fading into irrelevancy.

    10. Re:They have access to the source... by Galactic+Dominator · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Being a responsible open-source developer means you confirm the bug lies elsewhere before assuming so. The "mark tainted" approach does no such thing. Hmm, I wonder does redhat have a hypervisor of choice?

      https://www.redhat.com/virtualization/rhev/desktop/hypervisor/

      Well call me Uncle Eddit they do. And it's not Virtualbox. Try FreeBSD as your host, it and Virtualbox will be rock solid and and faster networking.

      --
      brandelf -t FreeBSD /brain
    11. Re:They have access to the source... by Kjella · · Score: 5, Insightful

      It's the usual scenario, you pick the idiot:

      1. OSS evangelist throws sales pitch at newbie
      2. Newbie starts using OSS, tries to file a bug
      3. "Scratch my own itch" developer tells him to get lost

      You can't on the one side say "Hey, [OSS software] is just as good as [closed payware] and it's free if one will get you "Thanks we're always interested in the bugs our (paying) customer are experiencing" and the other "You got what you paid for, go fix it yourself". And if they say "Well I don't know how to code, could I pay someone to fix it?" then they'll be quoted custom development prices that'll scare anyone right back to COTS software because they're used to that cost being spread over thousands of users. Remember most people are used to getting the whole MS Office suite for $100-150, that's 15-20 hours at minimum wage.

      This isn't just some temporary situation, there's a great many people in the FLOSS community that literally don't want users, they just want more developers and anyone who isn't going to contribute anything isn't worth giving the time of day. Then there's the people who says it's so easy your Grandma could use it, but in practice it only works as a tech geek keeps fixing whatever broke in the last upgrade of Ubuntu. Because you don't get help, and if you do get help it's like 10% of the way pointing you in the right direction. You're seeing a regression? Can you bisect it down to what commit caused it? To a person who just use the binary packages on the system you might as well speak alien. Not to mention it's literally hours of work for someone who maybe wanted to take 5 minutes of their time to tell someone there's a bug. That's one of the things I learned, in 95% of the cases it's meaningless to just file a bug because very few developers bother to go around fixing bugs they don't experience themselves, and if they do they're likely to fix it on their own. Oh yes, and unlike any closed source software I've worked with OSS software makes you the steward of the bug. If there's a reproducible test case, it's still easier to file off a "is this still a problem?" than testing it yourself.

      Do I blame them? Not really, I do enough work at work to know I don't want to do free work at home as well. But some are setting users off on the completely wrong foot, giving them completely wrong expectations. It really should come with a warning label "For technical users only. You don't have to be a coder, but it helps. You did not pay for this software, so any person you ask for help is likely a volunteer. Your problems are not their problems, so it's not certain anyone wants to help. Don't expect any bugs to fix themselves just because you report it. The more help you can provide developers, the more likely it might get fixed. Getting angry because nobody can or will help will get you nowhere. In short, you're on your own."

      It isn't exactly an OSS sales pitch though.

      --
      Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
    12. Re:They have access to the source... by Risen888 · · Score: 2

      if one will get you "Thanks we're always interested in the bugs our (paying) customer are experiencing"

      I can't imagine which one you are talking about, but it's not one that I've ever seen.

      --
      Hey, I finally got my first freak! Took you long enough!
  5. So fix it! by MrEricSir · · Score: 3, Insightful

    VirtualBox is open source. Instead of name-calling and whining, how about fixing the underlying problem?

    --
    There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
    1. Re:So fix it! by microbee · · Score: 4, Insightful

      The driver is not in the linux kernel tree and distributed separately. So name calling is quite appropriate.

    2. Re:So fix it! by Bert64 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      But since the driver is open and distributed under the GPL, perhaps someone should fix it up and integrate it into the kernel, the less third party drivers you need to build and install the better - in kernel drivers always seem more stable and are a lot less hassle to deal with.

      --
      http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
    3. Re:So fix it! by Moxon · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Sounds like a good idea. Would you like to work on this?

    4. Re:So fix it! by TheNinjaroach · · Score: 3, Interesting

      VirtualBox is open source. Instead of name-calling and whining, how about fixing the underlying problem?

      Parts of VirtualBox are open source. If you want to network boot your VM by PXE, you need to pony up the cash for the closed source version maintained by Oracle. The open source version supposedly supports PXE boot, but I was never able to make that version work with our environment.

      As with MySQL, open source contributions to dual licensed software are not frequent nor great. With someone like Oracle at the helm, community cooperation with their free and open version is even further diminished.

      --
      I went to eat some animal crackers and the box said, "Do not eat if seal is broken." I opened the box and sure enough..
    5. Re:So fix it! by aztektum · · Score: 2

      Perhaps Oracle or users who are impacted should do it? The kernel devs would be foolish to accept every janky piece of shit code and take on the task of fixing it.

      Do it for a company with the deep pockets, like Oracle, and you'll have everyone else saying "WTF You did it for them and they can afford to fix it themselves!"

      If this bites a user in the ass, let them fix it. If it bites Oracle, let them fix it.

      --
      :: aztek ::
      No sig for you!!
    6. Re:So fix it! by ChrisDolan · · Score: 2

      Yes, that's right. Dave Jones has made noteworthy contributions to the kernel, so he gets a free pass to complain about a third-party driver that breaks the kernel, and he is allowed to propose workarounds to correct said breakage, even if they use snarky variable names.

    7. Re:So fix it! by EdIII · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I don't think name calling is ever really appropriate. It does not create an environment where people are willing to cooperate and work with each other. All it creates is a sense of hostility and defensiveness amongst developers.

      "tainted crap" is not helpful as a term or a category in any way shape or form. All it does is send the message that you have nothing but contempt for the other contributors. That can never be helpful.

      Perhaps another term, or any other term, would have been better. Terms like critical, serious, unstable, etc. They get the point across without injecting vitriol into the discussion or environment.

    8. Re:So fix it! by LateArthurDent · · Score: 4, Informative

      Parts of VirtualBox are open source.

      Correct

      If you want to network boot your VM by PXE, you need to pony up the cash for the closed source version maintained by Oracle.

      The non-open source parts of virtual box are free as in beer. That said, PXE isn't a part of it, USB peripherals are.

      The open source version supposedly supports PXE boot, but I was never able to make that version work with our environment.

      Have you tried getting PXE working with the proprietary virtualbox? I suspect it won't work either, and that the problem is that VirtualBox doesn't like your PXE setup, not that they're trying to force you into the proprietary version.

      As with MySQL, open source contributions to dual licensed software are not frequent nor great. With someone like Oracle at the helm, community cooperation with their free and open version is even further diminished.

      As much as I would generally agree with you about Oracle, they really haven't screwed up VirtualBox at all since they bought Sun. In fact, it's been seeing pretty good development with the addition of some nice features.

    9. Re:So fix it! by EdIII · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Whatever. I don't know the standardized terms and fully admit that.

      Funny is one thing, and what I am saying has nothing to do with being politically correct at all and I think most people know that.

      "tainted crap" is not a politically charged term. Whether or not it is humorous is going to be a hit or miss depending on the receiver. Or are you really trying to tell me that "tainted crap" is such a well used term in open source that everybody would understand it to be humorous and not to be taken personally?

      Even if it is, new developers are coming around all the time and might not understand it for what it allegedly is. I certainly did not, and I am just getting involved with open source to the point where I can start contributing. If somebody marked my contribution as "tainted crap" I would not immediately take it lighthearted and would more than likely see it as non constructive, combative, and hostile.

      Open source needs as many contributors as possible and to do so, just maybe, maybe, it might not be such a good idea to be throwing around attributions to other people's contributions like that. Just sayin'.

      In any case, you are only supporting my main point. That civilized discourse is the best option in such communities and your point you are trying to make to me, is that it should not have been taken personally and was "civilized" because I should have understood it to be humorous.

  6. uugh. overblown story by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    One of the developers wanted to flag the vbox driver as tainted to keep bug submissions on it from going to kernel devs.

    this is *way* overblown.

    1. Re:uugh. overblown story by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I love how the submitted title was exactly that, and the editors decided it wasn't sensational enough

  7. Good job, wants some cheese for your whine? by BitZtream · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Really, you should just refuse to provide any help or consideration for people using virtual box like you guys do if anyone is using a binary driver. I mean lets face it, thats what you're doing here. This is just another form of NIH syndrome.

    As a developer, I understand the frustration of dealing with someone elses shitty software that you have absolutely no control over.

    This however is one of those situations where there is no doubt what so ever that rather than just whining about it, he could have done something useful about it. The drivers aren't THAT complex in the first place. If he is so confident that it has these problems then surely he has documented when they occur as proof, which means fixing them should be fairly trivial as well.

    Instead of being so high and mighty ... oh never mind, whats the point, its not your fault, its someone elses, your code is awesome and everyone will bow down to you guys. I know you guys like to think Linux is ruling the world, but you're still no where near big enough to start trying to pull an Apple/Google/Microsoft and force people to do it your way. You've tried this before and again, you'll lose.

    --
    Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
    1. Re:Good job, wants some cheese for your whine? by PatDev · · Score: 2

      As a developer, I understand the frustration of dealing with someone elses shitty software that you have absolutely no control over..... has documented when they occur as proof, which means fixing them should be fairly trivial as well.

      If you truly believe that just having a large collection of triggers to a bug is all that is required to render fixing that bug "fairly trivial", then I sincerely hope I never find myself on the same dev team as you.

      Denying support for binary-blob drivers is a perfectly reasonable thing to do. The kernel developers have finite time for support. If they choose to spend their time on investigating issues where they are not blocked by arbitrary restrictions on the tools they need to do their job, then fine. After all, given the great difficulty of debugging without source (which you, as a developer, surely understand), I find it quite feasible that in the time they could fix one bug caused by an external binary-blob driver they could probably fix 10 others.

      Remember, this isn't a case of somebody just whining instead of doing something useful. This is a comment by somebody who is not doing this useful thing *because they are busy doing other useful things*.

    2. Re:Good job, wants some cheese for your whine? by gstoddart · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Instead of being so high and mighty ... oh never mind, whats the point, its not your fault, its someone elses, your code is awesome and everyone will bow down to you guys. I know you guys like to think Linux is ruling the world, but you're still no where near big enough to start trying to pull an Apple/Google/Microsoft and force people to do it your way. You've tried this before and again, you'll lose.

      Um, did you even read the article?

      Someone released a driver for Virtual Box, said driver causes instability and crashes.

      Do you think it's the job of the Linux Kernel devs to re-tool the kernel to work around this, or do you think it's just easier to push it back to the people who wrote the driver?

      I mean, seriously, from TFA:

      Even though this VirtualBox driver is open-source (it's under the GPL), the quality of the driver is quite poor and continues to cause issues for many users. In particular, kernel developers have become frustrated that this virtualization driver is causing random memory corruption. Specifically cited is "corrupt linked lists, corrupt page tables, and just plain 'weird' crashes."

      The code comment for the patch mentions, "vbox is garbage." The VirtualBox kernel driver is needed for providing some features to guests on this Sun/Oracle virtualization platform. While the VirtualBox kernel driver is open-source, it doesn't live within the mainline kernel tree and is distributed separately with the VirtualBox software package.

      So, if you start off with a working, stable kernel, apply this patch, and then end up with a broken, flaky kernel ... what is the conclusion other than the driver is crap?

      I'm not a Linux kernel developer ... but I have had someone try to write some badly written code on top of some systems I supported, only to have them come back and start filing large amounts of bug reports ... and by the time you waste your own time to realize this has nothing to do with your own code, it's too late. Hell, I even had one occasion where someone ignored the explicit statement that it wasn't thread safe, and definitely didn't implement transactions ... only to submit a bug report whining that the transactions didn't work like he wished them to. Of course it didn't, it said right up front it didn't and never would ... but he figured if he just pretended that it did, he'd be able to force us to make it do so. How was that my fault?

      If this module is leading to support issues, I can see why they'd draw the line and say "not our fault or problem".

      If I wrote crappy code for a Windows app, do you think Microsoft would be willing to listen to me submitting bug reports in Windows if it was becoming readily apparent that the problem wasn't in their code? Because, that's really what this is about from the sounds of it.

      I mean, really, Oracle throws poor code over the fence into production and makes the user be the beta tester ... that's not exactly new. Anyone ever seen Beehive? When I first saw it, it was a freshly steaming turd. No idea what it's like now, but at the time it was largely broken.

      I don't see this so much about NIH as "WTF makes this my problem".

      --
      Lost at C:>. Found at C.
    3. Re:Good job, wants some cheese for your whine? by afidel · · Score: 5, Informative

      Actually, MS did have those reports, probably 90% of BSOD's over the years were caused by third party drivers. MS moved large chunks of the driver infrastructure into user space and for those areas where performance was deemed more important than isolating the drivers and kernel they implemented a more robust WHQL process and required drivers to be signed after WHQL testing was completed. This probably reduced the number of BSOD's experienced by 85% or so.

      --
      There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
    4. Re:Good job, wants some cheese for your whine? by Jonner · · Score: 3, Informative

      Really, you should just refuse to provide any help or consideration for people using virtual box like you guys do if anyone is using a binary driver. I mean lets face it, thats what you're doing here. This is just another form of NIH syndrome.

      As a developer, I understand the frustration of dealing with someone elses shitty software that you have absolutely no control over.

      This however is one of those situations where there is no doubt what so ever that rather than just whining about it, he could have done something useful about it. The drivers aren't THAT complex in the first place. If he is so confident that it has these problems then surely he has documented when they occur as proof, which means fixing them should be fairly trivial as well.

      Instead of being so high and mighty ... oh never mind, whats the point, its not your fault, its someone elses, your code is awesome and everyone will bow down to you guys. I know you guys like to think Linux is ruling the world, but you're still no where near big enough to start trying to pull an Apple/Google/Microsoft and force people to do it your way. You've tried this before and again, you'll lose.

      If you're so sure that fixing the buggy driver is easy and a more reasonable approach, why don't you do it? Linux already has two major alternatives to VirtualBox built in (KVM and Xen). It doesn't terribly need Virtualbox, but if Oracle made the effort to improve the quality, I'm sure it could be accepted into the mainline. The reason for tagging the driver as "crap" is because it apparently causes ongoing, hard to diagnose bugs and some Linux developers are tired of dealing with them when they can use the superior built-in options like KVM and virtio. It's not reasonable to expect developers to maintain something they have no interest in themselves and aren't being paid for.

    5. Re:Good job, wants some cheese for your whine? by RocketRabbit · · Score: 2

      That's not great. It's short sighted and causes considerable headaches for people with older devices.

      If they'd sit down for a week and decide on a proper model, they wouldn't have to redesign it EVER. Solaris has kept the same ABI since the beginning, and pretty much every benchmark out there shows it equal to (sometimes slightly ahead, sometimes slightly behind) Linux on the same hardware.

      The real reason that the Linux dictators decided not to settle on an ABI is so they can try to pressure and force manufacturers to release their drivers as GPL software. This sounds good, and I'm sure their intentions are mostly pure, but many drivers will never be open sourced for various reasons, and so really the end result is shitty 3D acceleration and other bullshit poo-butt problems that would not exist if they would settle down on a driver model.

    6. Re:Good job, wants some cheese for your whine? by StormReaver · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Linux already has two major alternatives to VirtualBox built in (KVM and Xen).

      And both of those "alternatives" are stinking, rotting donkey turds from and end-user perspective. VirtualBox is VERY easy to get up and running, while both KVM and Xen are terribly complex (with the latter being almost pointless). From any sane perspective, VirtualBox is the only viable Open Source virtualization software for Linux.

      I tried getting my company running on KVM, but gave up after days of frustration.

      Xen is a non-starter since it requires the OS to be specifically modified.

      It took me all of half an hour to do all the research I needed to get VirtualBox installed and running. My company, and my company's clients, are using VirtualBox.

      So yes, VirtualBox is far more important than any other virtualization system for Linux. Maybe if the KVM developers made it user-friendly, it would obsolete VirtualBox. But KVM isn't anywhere even remotely close.

  8. Oh the irony! by Baloroth · · Score: 2

    An open-source developer calls an open-source driver "tainted crap", and recommend a commercial alternative instead. Obviously, Oracle has something to do with that, but I'm a bit curious: are there any good open-source (or even free) virtualization software, aside from VirtualBox? Or might it be an area where FOSS just doesn't work very well (there are a few, IMHO).

    --
    "None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
    1. Re:Oh the irony! by ulzeraj · · Score: 2

      I have no problems running Windows 2003 HVMs on a "pure" Xen setup. They even have GPL PV drivers.

    2. Re:Oh the irony! by Rich0 · · Score: 2

      KVM is pretty comparable (well, if you have virtualization hardware extensions - on older CPUs it doesn't work unlike Virtualbox). I wouldn't call Xen comparable - it doesn't run unmodified guests. For running linux on linux it works fine, but if you don't have the OS source or a Xen-compatible guest OS you're not going to be able to use it.

      Of course, if you are running linux on linux and don't mind messing around with it something like linux containers probably would be more efficient.

    3. Re:Oh the irony! by afidel · · Score: 2

      Yes, there is Xen and KVM, both of which are in the mainline kernel.

      --
      There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
    4. Re:Oh the irony! by h4rr4r · · Score: 3, Informative

      That has not been true for years.
      Xen 3.0 added the ability to run unmodified guests.

      http://wiki.xensource.com/xenwiki/XenFaq

      It also depends on having VT. Running virtualbox on a cpu old enough to not have VT support would be an exercise in frustration.

    5. Re:Oh the irony! by suy · · Score: 3, Informative

      I have a CPU old enough to not have virtualization extensions, and runs a simple instance of Windows XP (to test stuff with Explorer 6, and to run some Win-only university software), and it works like a charm.

      When I needed to have a Windows available ASAP, VirtualBox was a life saver. I set up everything through the graphical tool, and I had to read 0 manuals. It just worked in a matter of minutes, not hours or days. If in the future I have to replace everything by QEMU because VirtualBox is crap inside, then fine because I won't be in a hurry anymore.

      But if anything, VirtualBox is the opposite of a frustrating experience to me.

    6. Re:Oh the irony! by Pengo · · Score: 2

      On that note, from someone who has used both Virtualbox and VMWare on Linux (Yes, Virtualbox is crap)

      KVM felt really strange for a little bit, I was used to Xen but as our servers slowly moved to Ubuntu LTS, I made the jump.

      1-2 days of studying and playing in a lab envornment was all it took to being able to script my own deployment scripts and be able to throw up servers into my lan with just a simple script call. I never had a single problem with KVM and the performance was amazing. I'm not discounting that other VM's have their place, and I'm sure KVM has its warts, but I -never- had a problem with it.

      Now... with that said, I never tried running non-ubuntu hosts on it. I ran Linux guests, ubuntu Guests at that running the same version of Ubuntu on guest that the host was running. IO was never a drama for me, which seemed to be more so with VirtualBox. I'm sure there are people who could chime in and explain why that was the case.

      I ran 12 production guests on a VM host with a Dell 2950 with 32g of ram in Raid10 configuration (6 decent magnetic drives).

  9. Re:I don't know..... by nedlohs · · Score: 3

    Ship it! In fact why did you bother with the "run" part?

  10. Crap? by spagthorpe · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I used vbox for several straight months doing quite a bit of Linux development using it, hosted on a Win7 machine. Other than missing a few nice to have features I could have used, like drag and drop that VMware has, I had zero issues with it. A lot of the features VMware has I didn't need, so stuck with what was working. The "crap" drivers made the VM as seemless as possible for me, and in full screen mode, was no different than booting into Ubuntu in classic mode (which is what I prefer anyway).

    I'd really like to know how many people are genuinely affected by these issues. I can't imagine I'm the only one that had zero issues.

    --

    WWJD -- What Would Jimi Do?
    (Smash amp, burn guitar, take home the groupies)

    1. Re:Crap? by Jonner · · Score: 2

      I used vbox for several straight months doing quite a bit of Linux development using it, hosted on a Win7 machine. Other than missing a few nice to have features I could have used, like drag and drop that VMware has, I had zero issues with it. A lot of the features VMware has I didn't need, so stuck with what was working. The "crap" drivers made the VM as seemless as possible for me, and in full screen mode, was no different than booting into Ubuntu in classic mode (which is what I prefer anyway).

      I'd really like to know how many people are genuinely affected by these issues. I can't imagine I'm the only one that had zero issues.

      The driver in question "vboxdrv" is used on a Linux host, so you never used it running Vbox hosted on Windows. The drivers you're referring to are the guest drivers, which are totally different. Your experience may indicate that the Windows equivalent of vboxdrv is less buggy. It's not surprising if Sun/Oracle put a higher priority on Windows than Linux.

  11. Re:Host or guest? by GameboyRMH · · Score: 2

    The driver is part of VirtualBox (you'll get a notification that it needs to be recompiled on launching VirtualBox after every kernel upgrade) and it affects installations where Linux is the host. That said I've had it in for years and haven't had any problems.

    --
    "When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
  12. Re:And? by Haedrian · · Score: 4, Funny

    Its a non-existant three dimensional cube

  13. To those saying FOSS devs should fix it... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2

    To those saying FOSS devs should fix it, fix it yourself.

  14. Sorry, what? by Windwraith · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I have been using Virtualbox for years and never had any of those issues. This is the first notice I have about it not being just awesome.

    1. Re:Sorry, what? by cachimaster · · Score: 2

      I also have been using Virtualbox since then 1.xx version (now 4.xx) in many hardware environments, always using ubuntu as host, and many guest from OpenBSD to windows 8.

      I never had the single problem with it, everything worked rock-stable and fast. Since the oracle take-over, I have to say it actually improved a lot, just take a look at the changelog, hundreds of bugs fixed in the last months.

  15. Re:They shouldn't. by Morty · · Score: 3, Interesting

    The intent is not "in open source, the burden is on users to fix issues." Rather, the intent is "in open source, frustrated users have a potential recourse other than relying on the developers."

    Unfortunately, the usual phrasing does not make this clear.

    In the closed source world, it's perfectly normal when filing a bug report to get back a polite "we acknowledge that issue, but it isn't affecting much of the user community. In the interest of prioritizing our scarce development resources, we will not be addressing that issue on our current roadmap, unless it impacts a significantly larger fraction of our paying customer base."

    In the open source world, I think the intent of "use the source, Luke" is to be shorthand for something similar:

        "We acknowledge that issue, but it has not been reported by much of our user community. In the interest of prioritizing our scarce development resources, we will not be addressing that issue on our current roadmap, unless it impacts a significantly larger fraction of our user base. Please continue to report other bugs; all bug reports are valuable feedback, and we do fix many user-reported bugs based on our triage and prioritization processes. Note that, if this bug is sufficiently problematic for you, and you have the necessary skills and resources, you have the source! So you are welcome to fix this for yourself, should you be so inclined."

    Unfortunately, frazzled developers are far more likely to give a curt response rather than spending the time to write up something more polite. FWIW, I'd be happy for anyone who wishes to use the wording I just used.

    Again FWIW, my own experience is that both closed source and open source developers vary widely in their support level. As a for-instance, I found a problem with a certain closed-source device vendor's product not being RFC compliant, and therefore failing to properly inter-operate with an open-source management program. A coworker contacted the vendor as a (paying) customer, while I contacted the mailing list for the open-source software. The author of the open-source software emailed me a workaround within hours. My coworker is still waiting for a useful response from the vendor.

    Conversely, we had several interoperability problems between a different vendor and a different open-source program. The vendor actually had already made a patch for one of the issues, but we couldn't deploy it. The maintainer of the open-source program refused to workaround one of the issues on their end, because the vendor had patched it, and we should just install the patch. While I didn't like the situation, this was a major problem for us, so I was motivated to hit the source. Because I had source, I was able to write my own patch.

    Obviously, YMMV.