The poisoned NUL byte, 2014 edition (Project Zero)

Posted Aug 27, 2014 23:35 UTC (Wed) by intgr (subscriber, #39733)
In reply to: The poisoned NUL byte, 2014 edition (Project Zero) by roskegg
Parent article: The poisoned NUL byte, 2014 edition (Project Zero)

> Linus Torvalds personally promised that Linux would be a gold standard POSIX implementation.

Interesting, where did he state that promise? I believe he's been pragmatic about not supporting things that don't make sense in POSIX.

The oft-cited promise Linus made was about stability of Linux user space APIs from one version to the next, not compatibility with other systems.

> That is why he went with X11

Linus wrote the kernel, others worked on porting GUIs to Linux. XFree86 was ported because there wasn't much choice, non-X11 graphical systems were proprietary at the time. It had nothing to do with promises of compatibility.

> You can innovate and move forward without breaking things that work.

You mean just like PulseAudio adopted ALSA APIs unchanged, and how systemd provides transparent compatibility with sysvinit APIs (initctl, telinit etc) and initscripts including LSB headers; journal passthrough to syslog, and more?