Quotes of the week

>I have zero sympathy for people complaining about the cost of introducing a new syscall - all that <gasp> review, dealing with objections, etc., because if they do not pay it, we will.
It looks like there's a problem with that, however. All too often maintainers just stonewall certain features until they become widely used (usually in a very ugly form). This has happened with an alarming amount of stuff: uprobes, yama, performance counters, suspend blockers and other Android stuff, and now DBUS.

So it's understandable that some developers might not want to even start interacting with the kernel community. For example, I'd added several ugly hacks in the OOM killer to get OOM event notification functionality for our internal project. It was done in a couple of weekends and it works just fine (except that the kernel often crashes by itself in OOM conditions, but that's another story). I don't even want to contemplate getting it into the mainline kernel - I lose all desire to do it just by reading about the past attempts.

Certainly, Linux is a very successful project. But it still might be worthwhile to look at the cases where there's a significant friction between kernel developers and their downstream users. Developers who speak in absolutes (like "I'll NAK all tracepoints") certainly don't help there.