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Linus Chews Up Kernel Maintainer For Introducing Userspace Bug

Posted by timothy on from the otherwise-of-course-I'd-be-a-kernel-rockstar dept.

An anonymous reader points out just how thick a skin it takes to be a kernel developer sometimes, linking to a chain of emails on the Linux Kernel Mailing List in which Linus lets loose on a kernel developer for introducing a change that breaks userspace apps (in this case, PulseAudio). "Shut up, Mauro. And I don't _ever_ want to hear that kind of obvious garbage and idiocy from a kernel maintainer again. Seriously. I'd wait for Rafael's patch to go through you, but I have another error report in my mailbox of all KDE media applications being broken by v3.8-rc1, and I bet it's the same kernel bug. And you've shown yourself to not be competent in this issue, so I'll apply it directly and immediately myself. WE DO NOT BREAK USERSPACE! Seriously. How hard is this rule to understand? We particularly don't break user space with TOTAL CRAP. I'm angry, because your whole email was so _horribly_ wrong, and the patch that broke things was so obviously crap. ... The fact that you then try to make *excuses* for breaking user space, and blaming some external program that *used* to work, is just shameful. It's not how we work," writes Linus, and that's just the part we can print. Maybe it's a good thing, but there's certainly no handholding when it comes to changes to the heart of Linux.

6 of 1,051 comments (clear)

  1. Not the bug... by Tau+Neutrino · · Score: 5, Informative

    It wasn't really the bug that set Linus off. At least not in my reading of the post. It was Mauro's cavalier attitude toward the bug. He tried to shrug it off as a problem with pulseaudio, when it clearly was a bug that he had introduced.

    I'm not a big fan of this style of management, but I can't fault any of the content of Linus' rant.

    --
    Lemmings are silly; dinosaurs are extinct.
    1. Re:Not the bug... by krinderlin · · Score: 5, Informative

      No. He clearly stated that he saw this, "at first glance," as something that Pulseaudio had been doing all along. The patch made a function not only return a different error code, but an error code that was never possible before the patch. The change was not documented, at all.

      The submitter really set him up, though. If you look further up in the thread, the "rollback" was a simple one line change from ret = -ENOENT; to ret = -ENVAL;. I'm fairly certain that it was just overlooked in the code review for the entire patch.

      What got him was that instead of going back and saying, "Huh. Why did we change this error code? Oh my, ENOENT was never even possible before this. This'll break all sorts of crap!" he blamed Pulseaudio. That's a serious no-no that's been covered several times in the history of the kernel.

  2. Re:Linus is an asshat, imho by tuffy · · Score: 5, Informative
    The Linux kernel management style is well documented.

    For example:

    Similarly, don't be too polite or subtle about things. Politeness easily ends up going overboard and hiding the problem, and as they say, "On the internet, nobody can hear you being subtle". Use a big blunt object to hammer the point in, because you can't really depend on people getting your point otherwise.

    --

    Ita erat quando hic adveni.

  3. Re:Arsehole by arth1 · · Score: 5, Informative

    Linus hates ethnic minorities. He sees daily what they are doing to his beloved homeland and regrets that he has to work with them.

    Don't feed the trolls, they say. But in this case, there may be a few readers here that don't know that Linus Torvalds belongs to an ethnic minority of Finland - the Swedish speaking minority who are not always well accepted in either Finland or Sweden.
    And, of course, that after moving to the US, he's still in an ethnic minority. Perhaps even more so.

  4. Re:not good management technique by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    It's not like he wrote a patch with a changelog of "Break sound. Users have had functional audio capability for far too long."

    It was a bug in the patch which broke the kernel interface (by returning different error codes), which was not the intended effect of the patch. Laurent Pinchart, the author of the patch, explained in the thread:

    The patch uses the -ENOENT error code internally in the uvcvideo driver to
    inform the caller function (internal to the driver) that the requested control
    doesn't exist. It was never meant to be returned out of the driver, and
    definitely not to userspace. This is clearly a bug.

    The reason Mauro Chehab got chewed out was because he refused to acknowledge that it was a kernel bug, didn't see anything wrong with a sudden change in the kernel return value, and then proceeded to blame pulseaudio for not handling it. That's why, other than his patch being called "total and utter CRAP" and "incredibly broken shit", Laurent was not mentioned in the email, whereas Mauro was told to shut up and called out as flat out incompetent.

  5. Re:Still.... by swillden · · Score: 5, Informative

    This sounds so gimp like. Like a teen at school trying to get in with the popular set. Or Dobby from Harry Potter.

    It's just pragmatism. For every programmer competent to work on the kernel there are a thousand wannabes, so some vetting process is required. In companies, this is done via resumes and interviews -- and then generally by giving new software engineers projects of low importance so you can vet their work before trusting them with stuff that could break the business. Same thing, just a different context.

    --
    Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.