Quotes of the week [LWN.net]

But, it turned out that they would only use the kernel series for a while during the development phase, and then stop after they "shipped" the device. Look at all of the Android phones sitting on old obsolete versions of 3.4 and 3.10 stable kernels. They aren't even updated to newer ones, and so, it didn't really help all that much. Even though I am fixing security bugs for these kernels, no one pushes them to the users. I have an example of a security bug that a Google researcher found in a 3.10 kernel (but not mainline) I fixed and pushed out an update, but never got picked up in Nexus phones until 6 months later when I found the right person/group to poke within Google.

That was a 6 month window where anyone could have gotten root on your phone, easily.

People say "look, we are using an LTS kernel in our product, all must be good!" but if they don't update it, it's broken and insecure, and really no better than if they were using 3.10.0 in a way.

— Greg Kroah-Hartman

All I have left to say is:

     yell_WTF(nr_wtf_moments);

I leave the value of the function argument to your imagination.

— Thomas Gleixner

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Quotes of the week

Posted Sep 16, 2016 8:12 UTC (Fri) by bojan (subscriber, #14302) [Link] (1 responses)

Totally agree with GKH. Android Linux guts are completely broken. It's pretty much like the old Unix crap in the nineties. Everybody has their own slightly different version, broken in its own unique way. And don't even get me started on binary drivers. Absolute junk.

Patching? What patching?

Quotes of the week

Posted Sep 16, 2016 18:29 UTC (Fri) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link]

I always get a mild feeling of despair when I open an app on a phone and see the screen with a garbage palette for half a second, or other similar nonsense other platforms grew out of 20 years ago. "Yep, that's an ARM..."