Quotes of the week

[Posted April 15, 2015 by corbet]

Every time a vendor supplies a 32-bit time_t OS to a 32-bit computer user, it creates a potential circumstance someone might be running that close to one of the numerous issues coming close to 2038 (there are a number of them, read the wikipedia page, and pay close attention to NTP as well). The potential is low today, but increases as time_t ticks...

— Theo de Raadt

YOU’RE PING. WHY DO YOU EVEN CARE WHAT KERNEL VERSION IS RUNNING.

— Dave Jones

Next, the police stops the bus and wants to know who's on it. As the programmers usually don't respond when being spoken to, especially if it is the police, the bus conductor hands out a list of all the passport copies he gathered. That is called introspection that is not backed by cooperative bus members. The conductor makes a copy of each OF THE PASSPORT of the people entering the bus, to help the police (i.e. debuggers) determine who is on the bus.

— Daniel Mack (paraphrased by Greg Kroah-Hartman) explains kdbus

This thread has made me realize that even as I am able to carve out more time to work on things like IB maintaintership, I no longer have the desire to spend my time maintaining the IB subsystem. Since my current level of activity is clearly hurting the community, I've decided to step down as maintainer.

— InfiniBand maintainer Roland Dreier moves on (thanks to Yann Droneaud)

Quotes of the week

Posted Apr 16, 2015 17:55 UTC (Thu) by klossner (subscriber, #30046) [Link] (4 responses)

Ping doesn't actually check the kernel version. It prints the "not very fresh" message when it sees an IP_RECVERR breakage that was supposedly fixed in 2.4.9. There are scattered bug reports that say this still happens sporadically, so apparently the breakage wasn't completely healed.

Quotes of the week

Posted Apr 16, 2015 18:23 UTC (Thu) by pr1268 (guest, #24648) [Link]

Darn... I was hoping we might have stumbled upon another Easter Egg of the "your printer is on fire" variety. :-)

Quotes of the week

Posted Apr 17, 2015 13:31 UTC (Fri) by Anssi (subscriber, #52242) [Link]

According to the discussion on the Debian bugreport ( https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=709052 ) it was a case of uninitialized variable which triggered the message.

Quotes of the week

Posted Apr 20, 2015 12:35 UTC (Mon) by niner (subscriber, #26151) [Link]

Funny that I hit this exact error just a day before this lwn edition was published. It occured on a really crappy mobile connection with ping times of a full minute and large package loss (as you can imagine). I guess such a barely existent network connection can lead to surprising error cases.

Quotes of the week

Posted Apr 27, 2015 19:32 UTC (Mon) by jch (guest, #51929) [Link]

Yeah, the usual "userspace programmers are stupid, I won't even check the source" attitude from the kernel people.

Folks, we understand that kernel development is a complex task, that's why we work around kernel lossage without complaints. Can we have just a little bit of respect?