Quotes of the week [LWN.net]

Apparently it is a bad idea to compose and send a patch while in a C++ standards committee meeting where people are arguing about async futures...

— Paul McKenney

I believe the answer is that recent vulnerabilities have lead us to abandon the idea that we can trust anything in userspace, and retreat to the kernel. The concept that the kernel is more secure because we didn't include lots of crap seems to be a heretical thought.

— Rusty Russell

Long experience with file systems shows us that they are like fine wine; they take time to mature. Whether you're talking about ext2/3/4, btrfs, Sun's ZFS, Digital's ADVFS, IBM's JFS or GPFS etc., and whether you're talking about file systems developed using open source or more traditional corporate development processes, it takes a minimum of 3-5 years and 50-200 PY's of effort to create a fully production-ready file system from scratch.

— Ted Ts'o

I went to prepare a patch to fix this, and ended up finding no such problem to fix - which fits with how no such problem has been reported.

— No-such-signoff-by: Hugh Dickins

The requirement for a FIPS 140-2 module is to disable the entire module if any component of its self test or integrity test failed....

There are two solutions that were contemplated for disabling the module: having a kind of global status of the crypto API that makes it non-responsive in case of an integrity/self-test error. The other solution is to simply terminate the entire kernel. As the former one also will lead to a kernel failure eventually as many parts of the kernel depend on the crypto API, the implementation of the latter option was chosen.

— Stephan Mueller; don't try to load a unsigned module in FIPS mode

What is the proper amount of time to wait upon receiving an email containing obviously incorrect statements about Linux kernel code before sending a "you have got to be kidding" email response.

Should I just hope the sender realizes their foolishness on their own and give them N hours to rescind the statement and fix up their insane patch and resend it, thereby giving them a grace period? If so, what is the proper value for N?

Or is it fair game to let loose and channel up the Torvalds-like daemons within my keyboard, with the hope that it would actually do some good and they would learn from their mistakes?

— Greg Kroah-Hartman

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Proposal for next month

Posted Oct 18, 2012 22:50 UTC (Thu) by rusty (✭ supporter ✭, #26) [Link]

Better feedback would be to indicate which you would cut.

If I had to order them from most interesting to least, I'd pick:
1) Hugh. Short, witty, long link very informative.
2) Stephan. An important warning, under-reported and under-debated.
3) Ted. The quote is a common theme of his, but the whole post is very informative.
4) Greg. I commented on his thread, so obviously found it worthwhile.
5) Rusty. Thread was kind of interesting, but this comment was a bit banal.
6) Paul. This provides some insight into a day in Paul's life, but not really in the same league as say #1.

I think cutting at <= 3 would be a good guide; I'm then more likely to follow the links to learn something.

Thoughts welcome,
Rusty.

Proposal for next month

Posted Oct 18, 2012 23:02 UTC (Thu) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link]

OK, my take (in the original order):

McKinney: show-off.
Rusty: interesting thought, but lacks quote value.
Ts'o: obvious, beaten to death already by Val Aurora, tl;dr.
Dickins: perhaps funny to hard-core kernel devs?
Mueller: tl;dr.
Greg K-H: tl;dr.

I know that the wave of tl;dr points to the CADT model, but I think that a good quote of the week should be really short and have a quick point. Pass the twitter test, or the soundbite test. Sometimes one longish paragraph can be OK, but three?!?

Proposal for next month

Posted Oct 19, 2012 19:42 UTC (Fri) by PaulMcKenney (subscriber, #9624) [Link]

For your #1, I would have instead said "grasping at straws to rationalize my earlier posting of a totally brain-dead patch", but if that is considered to be showing off, so be it. ;-)

Proposal for next month

Posted Oct 20, 2012 9:13 UTC (Sat) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link]

OK, then I go with Rusty's explanation :)

Proposal for next month

Posted Oct 20, 2012 21:39 UTC (Sat) by PaulMcKenney (subscriber, #9624) [Link]

Works for me! ;-)

Proposal for next month

Posted Oct 23, 2012 1:49 UTC (Tue) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]

There are not many circles where mentioning that you're in a C++ standards meeting is considered bragging. Glad LWN is one of them. :)

Proposal for next month

Posted Oct 20, 2012 7:50 UTC (Sat) by malcolmt (guest, #65441) [Link]

Your quote, Rusty, is actually quite pertinent, even outside the particular thread. It echoes a concern some of us out here in userland development have had for a while, although slightly more diplomatically phrased than I might have.

Proposal for next month

Posted Oct 23, 2012 2:01 UTC (Tue) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]

Such a shame to see kernel discussion on extremely proprietary Google Plus.

Proposal for next month

Posted Oct 23, 2012 4:05 UTC (Tue) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

Indeed, but who knows, maybe Linus will do a bitkeeper/git thing for Google+.