> Linux 7.1 is also notable for its code removals. Driven by AI-assisted bug reporting, ISDN and other old network driver code was removed to avoid that influx of bug reporting against those very rarely touched or used drivers for obsolete hardware.
Moving really old and unused code out of the kernel just to get less AI-assisted bug reports is IMO one of the best consequence ever of AI.
I love it.
We should start trimming the fat out of everything.
The old unmaintained ISDN hardware for which the code has been removed is likely 20 years old, or so. The perfectly good laptops are usually 3-4 times younger.
FreeBSD and NetBSD aren't going anywhere and can be used for older hardware, for the amount of production and load bearing use Linux sees there's an enormous amount of cruft and garbage in it.
That's good for your personal computing, but a renewing forest fire is good for all sorts of organizations. And species. It's a very good algorithm to run.
It's naturally de-ossifying and forces uptake of new methods and practices.
It gives you an opportunity to question assumptions and do things greenfield again.
I remember working with a guy who apparently deleted more code than he added in his time at the company. I think it said more about the codebase than anything but it was good that someone was trying to make it better.
Funnily, I have been that guy at the last 3 places I've worked at. Every place has some amount of cruft code, and I love sniffing it out and deleting it.
Is the parent really being sarcastic? I read it as genuine.
There’s presumably plenty of code bloat in the kernel, and while no human would ever scan for bugs in a corner of the kernel that hasn’t been used or touched in decades, AI 100% will. And while those bug reports might be useless as bug reports, they seem promising as “why is this code even here?” flags.
I don't mean to be harsh, but if there's a codepath that is exercised on your hardware, but not on mine, I don't think it would be fair for me to deem it as "bloat". There are a TON of supported devices and use cases that are not my own, but are essential to someone else.
Sure, sure. I’m not arguing for removing drivers for uncommon devices, or even rare devices. But there’s a line somewhere. Maybe it’s at “devices that no longer exist.” But I think it’s somewhere before that. And I have no idea how you’d figure out which devices fall where around this hypothetical line. I can only hope that they had good justification for these removals.
Maybe that points to an architecture issue? Is kernel driver support general enough to support all hardware in theory? If so it should be on hardware to provide a compatible api IMO. Note: I really have no experience in any of this there is probably more important things to consider like security/control or something.
> very rarely touched or used drivers for obsolete hardware
I guess end users can not upgrade but a definition of obsolete would be nice.
To me, every HP printer ever is obsolete. But I assume someone else has an equally valid and different opinion. How does that go with computer hardware?
Chesterton's Fence only says to learn why the fence was erected, it gives no other guidance on what to do after that. There isn't too much mystery in why a device driver was made, so Chesterton's Fence yields next to nothing here.
It's ok, you can let go of Chesterton's ISDN phone pole now. Come, we have cable, we have fiber. Just for you, I'll even fire up a little hotspot from the palm of my hand as we walk away.
Presumably that old code was actually useful at the time it was added. It might not be used now, but it helped someone back then. One of the great things about early Linux was that it tried to run on every piece of hardware available. If Linus only wrote drivers (or allowed others to submit drivers) that worked on his personal computer, Linux would have never flourished this far.
Is there anything particularly interesting about this? The first number of the version changes when the second number gets too big, not for any other reason.
What is lacking in the previous one? NTFS support in linux is mostly to read and write files from windows disks, right? I think all the NTFS linux drivers - even the fuse one before the Paragon one - have been alright at that.
Ubuntu switched to the Paragon NTFS driver by default. When I upgraded to kernel 6.5 (I think) from Ubuntu, I started getting frequent kernel panics, like every day. Soon, I noticed that I couldn't even compile a Rust project on an NTFS partition because the compiler was getting random file system errors, and compiling was at high risk of causing a kernel panic. The NTFS driver in that kernel version is just totally broken. I switched to the FUSE NTFS-3G, and then I stopped getting panics and can compile stuff again no problem.
Looking at kernel commits, it looks like the driver may have been fixed since, but I'm scared to use it after it had such major brokenness in that version.
It wound up being OK, but it had a long span of time where it was virtually unmaintained and turned out to be buggy at points. The newer NTFS driver is based off of the old read-only NTFS driver which subjectively many claim is cleaner (I honestly haven't done a head to head so idk) and they're having an easier time modernizing it with support for things like large folios. Seems like a good deal to me.
Personally: I used NTFS3 and it was alright. If anything the biggest thing I got hit by was an issue where the udisks2 mount call from Dolphin would result in NTFS-3g specific flags getting sent to it, causing the mount to fail. But in actual usage it actually worked just fine for me.
Looking back, I wonder what really changed over 25 years for the linux ecosystem. We had lots of distros, there were games built for linux (I remember playing the entire Neverwinter nights on debian) there was wine for StarCraft broodwars, x11+compiz for cool accelerated desktop graphics, proprietary Nvidia drivers were always there. Sure, everything was 32bit but it was good enough for desktop, and amd64 was about to pop.
The other day I tried to install fedora 44 on a friend's computer. He wanted kde so we set that up and whoops, no way to start programs on the discrete video card. I hacked around it by starting xorg, setting an alias and environment variables, but it was a bit embarrassing to see that things have regressed.
But not a very accurate blogpost. "Here's why this literally cannot work (in theory)" to denigrate a system that actually works (in practice). Their goal is to convince people to stop using it because it personally inconveniences them, but they never provide an alternative solution that actually solves the problem (in practice) that Anubis actually solves (in practice). If leaving the problem unsolved (in practice) was a desirable option, the site owner would not have turned to Anubis in the first place.
before and after apache logs showing much less crap in them from bots. Do you think the maintainers of https://lore.kernel.org/ would leave something in that didn't work? It isn't perfect but I have run it on a (much smaller) web site getting hammered by bots and logged "before" and "after" and the difference is measurable.
Its literally trivially objectively measurable, this isn't something that is based in opinion.
You can throw it up on your own website and simply grep the logs if you don't trust it, or look for the analysis reports from people who have done exactly that.
Like the other commenter said, why would linux.org deploy and leave deployed a technology that did nothing? Do they just enjoy trolling users? I doubt it.
Places that want to use Anubis but find the logo not professional enough are free to pay the author, IIRC it was major "professional support" benefit :D
It's mostly surprising how many grown adult men go into a blind rage when confronted with a picture of a cartoon woman. In a lobsters thread about Anubis, a community member of 12 years got themselves permanently banned because they were frothing at the mouth with accusations of pedophilia against the developer and refused to apologise when given an opportunity by moderators. Telling on themselves, perhaps? It's funny, in a bizarre way, that this is a hill people will die on.
> ...they were frothing at the mouth with accusations of pedophilia against the developer...
I think I remember that thread. IIRC, it went something very, very roughly like this:
Future banned user: It weirds me out a bit how young the mascot looks. I've never been comfortable with cutesy, underage-looking mascots.
The dogpile: How dare you insinuate that the dev a pedophile? Don't you know how anti-trans that dogwhistle is?
and the conversation degraded from there.
I'll also note that you chipped in with
> It's mostly surprising how many grown adult men go into a blind rage when confronted with a picture of a cartoon woman.
when -AFAICT- noone in this subthread expressed anything more heated than "dislike of kawaii". But perhaps you were speaking more generally, and weren't inspired by any conversation that happened in this subthread.
- "Anyway, possible slight hiccups in the merge window aside, the news
today is 7.1."
- "nothing particularly interesting or scary stands out, which is as it should
be."
Yeah, it gets boring when the number change doesn't change and try improving everything at once, but the great thing is that freshness improves driven by number fomo and that tightens the improvement loop.
Exciting and risky things are always under flags, so if you really care you just build, configure, and bench your own kernel+system.
Moving really old and unused code out of the kernel just to get less AI-assisted bug reports is IMO one of the best consequence ever of AI.
I love it.
We should start trimming the fat out of everything.