Brief items

I began my investigation with a strong presumption of chicanery. I was unable to imagine the project kickoff meeting in which Wacom decided to bundle Google Analytics with their device, which - remember - is essentially a mouse, but managed to restrain themselves from also grabbing some deliciously intrusive information while they were at it. I Googled “wacom google analytics”. There were a couple of Tweets and Reddit posts made by people who had also read Wacom’s privacy policy and been unhappy about its contents, but no one had yet tried to find out exactly what data Wacom were grabbing. No one had investigated Wacom’s understanding of the phrase “aggregate usage data” or whether it was anywhere near that of a reasonable person.

[...]

Some of the events that Wacom were recording were arguably within their purview, such as “driver started” and “driver shutdown”. I still don’t want them to take this information because there’s nothing in it for me, but their attempt to do so feels broadly justifiable. What requires more explanation is why Wacom think it’s acceptable to record every time I open a new application, including the time, a string that presumably uniquely identifies me, and the application’s name.

As a result, linux-5.6, or my backport of the patches to 5.4, should be the first release that can serve as a base for a 32-bit system designed to run beyond year 2038, with a few remaining caveats.

IOWs, if you are starting from the premise that "I don't know this code well enough to perform a useful review" then you are setting yourself up for failure right at the start. Read the series description, think about the change being made, use your experience to answer the question "what's a mistake I could make performing this change". Then go looking for that mistake through the patch(es). In the process of performing this review, more than likely, you'll notice bugs other than what you are actually looking for...

This does not require any deep subsystem specific knowledge, but in doing this sort of review you're going to notice things and learn about the code and slowly build your knowledge and experience about that subsystem.

Writing non-trivial software that is correct (for any meaningful definition of correct) is beyond the current capabilities of the human species.

Comments on how the code might be better structured would also be welcome; I'm afraid I open-coded a singly linked list in my haste...