Linux Kernel Developer Declares VirtualBox Driver "Crap"

Can that tag ... by yelvington · 2011-10-11 07:52 · Score: 3, Funny

Can that tag be applied to users, too?

Re:Can that tag ... by PolygamousRanchKid+ · 2011-10-11 08:10 · Score: 4, Funny

"User Error: Please replace user, and try again."
My favorite error message.

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Re:Can that tag ... by Darinbob · 2011-10-11 08:23 · Score: 4, Insightful

The second rule is that the programmer is an idiot, especially if they don't believe in the second rule.
Re:Can that tag ... by MachDelta · 2011-10-11 08:46 · 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. :)
Re:Can that tag ... by Jah-Wren+Ryel · 2011-10-11 09:23 · 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.

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Re:Can that tag ... by Sprouticus · 2011-10-11 09:34 · 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.
Re:Can that tag ... by ATMAvatar · 2011-10-11 16:10 · 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.

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wonderful by pak9rabid · 2011-10-11 07:55 · Score: 3, Informative

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

Slashdot Readers Declare Articles "Crap" by Anpheus · 2011-10-11 07:56 · 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."

Re:Slashdot Readers Declare Articles "Crap" by sstamps · 2011-10-11 08:15 · Score: 4, Informative

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

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They have access to the source... by emag · 2011-10-11 07:57 · 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?

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Re:They have access to the source... by DaveV1.0 · 2011-10-11 08:21 · 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?

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Re:They have access to the source... by Jonner · 2011-10-11 08:31 · 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.
Re:They have access to the source... by Anonymous Coward · 2011-10-11 08:34 · 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."
Re:They have access to the source... by Galactic+Dominator · 2011-10-11 11:25 · 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.

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Re:They have access to the source... by Kjella · 2011-10-11 11:28 · 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.

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So fix it! by MrEricSir · 2011-10-11 07:57 · Score: 3, Insightful

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

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Re:So fix it! by microbee · 2011-10-11 08:01 · Score: 4, Insightful

The driver is not in the linux kernel tree and distributed separately. So name calling is quite appropriate.
Re:So fix it! by Bert64 · 2011-10-11 08:07 · 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.

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Re:So fix it! by Moxon · 2011-10-11 08:12 · Score: 3, Insightful

Sounds like a good idea. Would you like to work on this?
Re:So fix it! by TheNinjaroach · 2011-10-11 08:19 · 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.

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Re:So fix it! by EdIII · 2011-10-11 09:32 · 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.
Re:So fix it! by LateArthurDent · 2011-10-11 09:56 · 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.
Re:So fix it! by EdIII · 2011-10-11 10:34 · 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.

uugh. overblown story by Anonymous Coward · 2011-10-11 07:57 · 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.

Re:uugh. overblown story by Anonymous Coward · 2011-10-11 08:05 · Score: 3, Insightful

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

Good job, wants some cheese for your whine? by BitZtream · 2011-10-11 07:57 · 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.

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Re:Good job, wants some cheese for your whine? by gstoddart · 2011-10-11 08:20 · 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".

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Re:Good job, wants some cheese for your whine? by afidel · 2011-10-11 08:38 · 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.

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Re:Good job, wants some cheese for your whine? by Jonner · 2011-10-11 08:40 · 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.
Re:Good job, wants some cheese for your whine? by StormReaver · 2011-10-11 12:18 · 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.

Re:I don't know..... by nedlohs · 2011-10-11 08:06 · Score: 3

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

Re:And? by Haedrian · 2011-10-11 08:18 · Score: 4, Funny

Its a non-existant three dimensional cube

Re:Oh the irony! by h4rr4r · 2011-10-11 08:46 · 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.

Re:Oh the irony! by suy · 2011-10-11 09:23 · 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.

Sorry, what? by Windwraith · 2011-10-11 09:42 · 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.

Re:They shouldn't. by Morty · 2011-10-11 14:36 · 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.

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