Quotes of the week

Monolithic kernels are far more amenable to less than awesome people messing with them. Sad but true, I'd love a microkernel world but I fear we are too stupid to get it. Something, something, something, this is why we can't have nice things.

We need to still think about performance a lot. There's already an ongoing trend of kernel bypass mechanisms in the wild for performance reasons, and the new increase of syscall costs will necessarily amplify this willingness to avoid the kernel. I personally don't want to see the kernel being reduced to booting and executing SSH to manage the machines.

I so hope this exercise will finally stop the kernel-necrophilia in distros. I know it won't but hope dies last.

Controlled disclosure for high profile bugs seems to only achieve two things:

1. Vendors can cover their butts and come up with deflection strategies.
2. The "theatre" aspect of security can be maximized as much as possible. We even have a pretty web site and cute avatars this time!

None of this has anything to do with having time to come up with the best possible implementation of a fix. You know, the technical part?

Generally we always want to tune for latency. Throughput is "easy", but almost never interesting.