So it's early Monday morning (well - early for me, I'm not really a morning person), and I'd love to have some good excuse for why I didn't do the 6.14 release yesterday on my regular Sunday afternoon release schedule.
I'd like to say that some important last-minute thing came up and delayed things.
But no. It's just pure incompetence.
Because absolutely nothing last-minute happened yesterday, and I was just clearing up some unrelated things in order to be ready for the merge window. And in the process just entirely forgot to actually ever cut the release. D'oh.
You know, though, his conduct nowadays isn't really that bad; I don't think I'd be bothered by it in a workplace environment. He makes strong assertions, but not mean-spirited, and I think Linus has a lot of reasons to feel highly confident when he makes strong assertions when it comes to Linux.
Of course, there are some moments, but almost everybody has their moments. When push comes to shove, Linus seems to handle the important things pretty well.
I read it and it seemed alright to me. A bit firm yes, but damn are there times when I wish people would have communicate with me with this level of honesty about how they're feeling regarding something. In some places, people have communicated with me with that level of honesty. It does require you to make sure you're not taking things personally when they're not meant to be, but it's a lot better than people trading subtle cues all the time, which seems to just lead to more explosive issues later on when things inevitably hit a breaking point.
Where do you really feel this message goes too far?
Some folks need more carrot, some need more stick. I don’t know the actors in this play, but I assume Linus (who presumably does have a mental map for these actors) is choosing to strike a tone which gets the message across without causing lasting damage.
Perhaps GP carries with them Linus’ priors resulting in a different reading of this specific message.
I think there’s any number of ways to reword that without using passive aggressive remarks and accusing other people of venting when you’ve been driven to venting in response. Something as simple as “keep your venting off the mailing lists in future” is short to the point and gets the same message across without resorting to personal insults.
Could certainly be less confrontational, but in this case, it doesn't really feel so unwarranted, in large part because coming from Linus regarding the Rust for Linux project, a stronger expression of frustration feels justifiable. It's a lot different than the real-life "toxic" communication I've witnessed, where the harshness is strictly one-sided and feels unjustifiable.
But I guess the line will be up to taste. I've been on the receiving end of harsher communication that I don't feel was completely uncalled for, too. I certainly can be a stubborn person and sometimes reasonable communication just isn't getting the message across. On the other hand, there are people who basically never do anything to warrant being communicated to like this. It would be ideal if everyone could communicate calmly and always get the message across, but frankly it just doesn't seem to work that way.
I disagree - the harshness here is personal insults and passive-aggressiveness. That's uncalled for and definitely "toxic".
It's very possible to be assertive and shut down unconstructive discussions, as Linus has repeatedly shown. Here [0] is a great example of Linus being firm, assertive, calling someone out on their shit.
I really regret the proliferation of terms like "toxic" to describe things as benign as this. I think it's literally recoloring people's perception of what bad communication actually looks like.
You brought the word up, not me. The tiles are simple - avoid character attacks, and don’t be passive aggressive. Be direct and firm.
Otherwise people will go off topic and take whatever meaning they want (like I did with Linus’) comment and you did the same with the word toxic, which you introduced
I agree with my sibling commentors, but I want to point out for people who do not go read the comment: this is not the off the walls Linus rant of the past.
This is a very even-handed response where Linus tells people to calm down, that the purpose of linux-next is to discover problems, and that Rust is not causing all of the problems.
At the very end there is a sentence or two that might be offensive, especially if you have a thin skin or aren't reflective about your own responses, but this is in no way akin to the bombs of the past.
I don’t think saying “he used to be worse” is a good defence. Has he gotten better? Yes. Is his email gone professional? No.
I think you’re wrong about the end, it’s an unnecessary personal attack that’s only purpose is to insult and/or to make Linus feel better. If you remove the last two or three paragraphs it’s a perfectly fine constructive response. With them, it’s a shitty, unnecessary escalation.
I don't think a "he used to be worse" defense is a takeaway from the above. The comment mentions the past to highlight it's not like previous rants people may assume it might be like to encourage giving it a read. Separate explanations were offered for why they believe the message was a reasonable response in its own light.
I agree the last 2-3 paragraphs could be better but I disagree that's the bar for what's professional, let alone what is reasonable to stand out out of a month's worth of emails. It's also hard to square that message being so horrible by nature of being shitty and just to make Linus feel better - to me, these are more pointed and more personally directed statements than the supposedly problematic discourse they're about (though still relatively mild overall).
We aren't all perfect in communication all the time, even the most ideal professionals. A large part of good discourse is accepting reasonable amounts of people being human and de-escalating smaller perceived slights naturally before declaring the conversation can't be stood for. Jumping at the latter can cause well meaning and well received folks to feel bullied, which is the exact opposite to the goal of trying to keep a professional air to discussion. Hell, some of the times I've been more colorfully told to look in the mirror were the best things which could have been said to me at the time (even if they might not be reasonable things to have heard at other times).
> We aren't all perfect in communication all the time, even the most ideal professionals. A large part of good discourse is accepting reasonable amounts of people being human and de-escalating smaller perceived slights naturally before declaring the conversation can't be stood for.
Do you not rink its fair to say that Linus has a track record of provoking that sort of behaviour?
I interpret the question as asking if I believe Linus has a track record of provoking escalating style behavior, if that's incorrect then ignore the following to re-ask and maybe I'll read it correctly the second time it's phrased :).
I'd disagree with that as his track record, though you won't find me claiming he is the perfect/ideal/flawless role model in that regard either. In my opinion, overall, he has reasonable and professional track record across the board these last few years (anything prior to that doesn't set the track record in my book). Especially if you read his emails regularly, not just the most popular ones about the most charged discussions he's asked to enter into. If you'd asked me the same question 10 years ago I'd've given a very different answer.
> Do you not rink its fair to say that Linus has a track record of provoking that sort of behaviour?
It's true that reporting on Linus' emails has a track record of only highlighting the rudest ones, creating this impression in your mind. Anything else is speculation.
> Do you not rink its fair to say that Linus has a track record of provoking that sort of behaviour?
Your point about Linus's behaviour are correct in some sense: other people would make the same point less aggressively. But you aren't making any attempt to balance the scales.
There isn't some other version of Linus lying on the shelf that has the technical decision making record he does, and is also a great diplomat. So the choices are: keep the flawed but highly talented man we have, or discard Linus for someone else who almost certainly will be worse technically, but may be a better wordsmith.
I'd wager most of the people here have jobs that depend on Linus's technical skills. That's certainly true of most people whose day jobs are working on the kernel. They've made their choice, and it's the obvious one. They'll take the man that abuses them for their mistakes over a silver tongued Mr average.
If you don't like that, go and work on your own kernel for Mr average. But if you take that route, be prepared for the fact that no one is going to want to use your kernel because, well, it's average.
Linus is perfectly capable of making the same point less aggressively, he's done so on the same topic [0].
> So the choices are: keep the flawed but highly talented man we have, or discard Linus for someone else who almost certainly will be worse technically, but may be a better wordsmith.
I don't think that's true. There's always other options.
Is it worth making absolutist assertions about such a relative topic? Offence is taken as much as it's given, and everyone has a different thickness of skin in these matters.
What's your problem with this email? I would expect this kind of constructive criticism from any team lead with a functioning brain and without a yes-man attitude.
That was a very calm and well-written e-mail, and an impressively mature way to decisively take a position on a technical issue that's controversial within the team. The only note I have is that adding "or is the problem between the keyboard and the chair, and you just want to vent" at the end was unnecessary, but it's not necessarily even wrong.
For someone in the games industry, you have an exceptionally thin skin and must have not been in many high stakes crises if the last two sentences bother you so much.
I don’t see how you can take away that they bother me so much and I must have a thin skin. If I saw them in a work email I’d ignore them and move on. If one of my direct reports sent that to a coworker I’d take them to the side and remind them to not be a dick .
It’s perfectly possible to be firm and direct without insulting people.
What? There was literally nothing wrong with that message - including the final sentence. He's calling for everyone to self-reflect and have humility - only someone profoundly lacking in it could be bothered by a message like this
Is he? or is he venting at someone while accusing them of doing the same thing back.
If instead of "Is the problem actually the rust code causing you issue, or is the problem between the keyboard and the chair, and you just want to vent?"
he said "Is the problem actually the rust code causing you issue, or do you just want to vent?" it's perfectly acceptable. The snide insults are petty, unprofessional, and unnecessary.
> only someone profoundly lacking in it could be bothered by a message like this
I could just as easily say that anyone who doesn't see that should look in a mirror and see if the see an ass staring back at them, but I wouldn't. When I read this, I see someone blowing off steam and knowing they can get away with it. I respect linus, and as I've said elsewhere he's perfectly capable of handling himself without resorting to passive aggressive insults.
Of course it could have been written more diplomatically. Yet, many people clearly don't find it to be offensive/inappropriate - especially when viewed in the context of the entire post, which was very well written and diplomatic.
Moreover, I can very much see how those precise words could be said verbally, in person, in a completely disarming, effective manner - by using particular pacing, tone, gestures, a wink, etc. Whether Linus would do that is another matter - but your comment was talking about how it would be inappropriate anywhere.
He is good herding cats. Sometimes you need a genius that can do incredible difficult stuff. Sometimes you need someone that is just very good and know how to avoid stupid stuff. Sometimes you need someone that is very good mixing technical and no technical decitions.
Other projects have been forked, abandoned, kidnaped by the adult supervision, lost all user due to backward incompatible changes, ... The mantainer of an open source project has no moat. Linus only onws the name, but anyone can make a fork and try to make a better job.
I am not deep into the Linus weeds but my impression is that he doesn't especially care if he's on the receiving end of this. It only started to feel different from "well, the Linux list is the PvP zone" when Linus was sufficiently weighty/famous that you almost had to take an insult from him to heart, and he did eventually correct his behavior there.
I'm also not that of a fan to know that many details, but I'd place my bets in that he actually doesn't care if people speak to him the same way, as long as they have solid arguments. I think Linus is overall one of the goods influences in this strange IT period.
One does not get a pass on being rude and hurtful to others by speaking about themselves negatively.
The fundamental thing that people never seem to understand in the "Linus is being an asshole" vs "I love Linus, he tells it like he is and to manage a project you have to be willing to do that!" debate is that it is completely unnecessary to speak at all about someone's person on a mailing list like lkml.
"This code sucks!" - no. "This code does not meet the linux kernel's coding conventions, has race conditions, and this algorithm could likely be implemented in a far more performant way."
"You're just WRONG" - no. "The position that you're being forced to learn a new programming language is not correct. You have not been asked to write or even understand Rust."
I think the people who think 'you have to be that way to manage/lead' have never been under a good manager or leader and I daresay that a lot of people in technical supervisory and management positions unfortunately grew up respecting Linus and thinking his behavior was how you "get things done", not realizing that Linus's behavior almost certainly kept a lot of people from risking contributing and if anything has hurt the Linux kernel project - and kept people from feeling they could safely point out problems in someone's code because
T'so is a great example; a huge ego. As a result, people simply have gone elsewhere to work on filesystems. The ext filesystem(s) were not terribly reliable or tolerant of real-world situations, is still not very performant, and has evolved at a glacial pace consistently lagging behind its peers.
As I cross 40 years in this industry, I find that my procrastination often has subtle root causes. I assume others have the same experience.
Currently, I've been putting off a long report for a few days and it's because I'm trying to balance a number of conclusions, tones, etc. When I'm ready, I'm ready.
For myself, I think it's just as much how to word things properly to most effectively get your point across, as it is to be ready if your report has some kind of backlash or isn't seen the way you meant it. You need to be mentally prepared to handle the response you get back, even if it's no response at all after you spent many hours putting a report together and worrying about how to make it just right. Obviously this will change depending on how important what you're reporting on is, and whether your work contributed to that report's findings.
He really has grown as a person. Ten years ago, there would have been no mention of it unless someone called it out, and the response to that would have boiled down to "f#ck off, it's free".
... Which also would have been relatable, and valid if we're being honest.
"f#ck off, it's free" is possibly an acceptable response if you're also working for free. If maintaining that free software is your job that you are getting paid good money to do, you really should hold yourself to higher standards.
Hm, depends on who is paying you, I think. If some philanthropist is paying you to make good free software, yes. But if you’re paid by stakeholders that want your maintenance to make sure they can use the free software themselves, you’re only really accountable to their opinions.
I assume he takes advice/feedback i.e. the famous ESR post and the concerns from that contributor from intel and others to heart. Or at least has forced himself to learn how to do so.
> please don't hype NTSYNC. yes it has better compatibility than ESYNC and FSYNC, yes it's marginally faster in selected title. The phoronix article reports benchmarks with WINESYNC vs NTSYNC, the gains are there only if you were not already running FSYNC (on by default in most titles running under proton).
> By overhyping features they ultimately end up underdelivering because people expect insane gains that were never there to begin with.
> For Valve's Proton however, don't go expecting much here with ntsync. As Valve developer Pierre-Loup Griffais replied to a user on Bluesky to note:
> We already include fsync, which should be as fast or faster as ntsync. We developed ntsync as a general solution that'd be acceptable in upstream Wine, but there's no urgency in including it in the Deck / SteamOS kernel.
One exciting aspect of NTSYNC is that it could get into wine upstream. FSYNC is only available in Proton and not in upstream wine, mainly because it is not fully conformant, i.e. it doesn't behave exactly like its Windows counterpart does. But NTSYNC doesn't have this problem.
That can be simplified by the topic and presentation. Is the content trying to educate, be entertaining or both. Is the topic extremely niche then you will find like minded people with suggestions and discussions.
If you've been anywhere around linux gaming circles for the past 6-8ish months, you've seen nothing but people not understanding the benchmarks hype NTSYNC. Everyone trying to set appropriate expectations is pretty quickly silenced in whatever manner the platform allows (downvote, etc)
I'm super excited for this! But it makes me curious.
What's the process like for getting such a low-level primitive added to Linux? Especially a low-level primitive that 1) exist basically just to emulate behavior of a completely different kernel, and 2) is only needed for a subset of users to play games?
I'm not complaining, just curious. I would assume a patch to add the above would be heavily scrutinized. Is it because the popularity of the Steam Deck / proton?
Technically this is not a low-level primitive. NTSYNC isn't added as a, say, system call like futex2[0] was. It's instead added as a character devivce - which you can build your kernel without, and functions via ioctls.
I don’t know if this answers your question directly: but the article points out that this is a module, not a primitive that’s in the kernel itself.
The idea here is that wine/proton can interact with this module directly if it’s loaded, or continue to use their wrappers around existing fsync if not.
I expect that means a little less scrutiny since if it segs the user can choose to not load it and achieve a stable OS.
Sometime around 2020-2021 I stopped checking if a video game will work in Linux. These days almost everything does with minimal friction. DXVK and Vulkan have been gamechangers.
Same here. Anything I try seems to just work. The only problem is anticheat but even those are starting to behave even when isolated and confined in containers.
Do note that these numbers are Upstream vanilla Wine vs Wine+NTSYNC and not Wine+fsync, which is more common and has comparable performance (if not sometimes better[0] according to a valve employee)
I also believe this kernel adds Intel GPU support for the N100 and N150 chips used in lots of mini PCs. I have a Beelink N150 rig running various Docker containers that I am curious to test some light AI workloads on.
What would be the meaning of that? I have a Beelink with N100 for more than a year and HW acceleration works already (I use it in Jellyfin), so I wonder what do you mean that "intel gpu support" would mean.
> Below is the shortlog for the last week. It's nice and small - not only was there no last-minute issue yesterday, the whole last week was pretty calm. The patch is dominated by some amd gpu updates, and even those are pretty small. The rest is random small changes all over.
Funny that Linus himself doesn't consider much in the release noteworthy besides the GPU stuff, yet the submission article goes on about "leaps", "big news" and "major step".
What you're quoting Linus on is his commentary about the patches landing in the past week, which is supposed to be only bug fixes as the code stabilizes enough for a stable release to be made. New features would lane weeks earlier during the merge window. What's newsworthy here is not anything that was merged recently, just the fact that this new functionality is now available from a stable release.
If there was anything really significant from the past week's changelog, it would likely have been reason to delay the stable release for at least another week.
Gell-Mann amnesia [1] is an interesting thing to think about here. But IMO the real problem is that editing for most journalism websites is done very very poorly, if at all.
tl;dr: better windows-like filesystem driver for Wine, better AMD GPU drivers, more Rust implementations, support for Snapdragon 8 Elite, fixed vulnerabilities on RISC-V, better btrfs
Well, one of the biggest drivers of consumer Linux adoption in recent years has been the Steam Deck, and compatibility with Steam games. The article explicitly calls out how this improves performance for this use case. I think your opinion is an unpopular one.
Yeah, I know multiple people running Linux at home and Windows compatibility us a critical feature for them. For the people I know not in tech about half would switch if Linux got up to par in:
1. Ability to play any video game
2. Compatibility with hardware (e.g. one of my friends is booting windows temporarily as his graphics card has an issue on Linux)
3. Usability/looks. This is subjective but for people used to Windows for the last couple decades people often find Linux more difficult to use and honestly uglier (Linux is customizable but most people I know are not confident enough to go far from the defaults).
This is just my friends, some of whom are engineers and some are normal people when it comes to technical ability, but currently a lot of them want to like Linux but have specific requirements holding them back.
I’m genuinely curious why you think this post is appropriate or beneficial for this topic or even this subthread? Linux isn’t a windows clone; everyone knows that.
Linux isn't a Windows clone but compatibility and parity with Windows are the biggest blockers to adoption for a lot of the potential userbase. This thread is specifically about compatibility with Windows so talking about how it's the most important feature for people I know (and also mentioning a few other ways people view Linux as generally a worse experience) is not off topic entirely. This thread is part of a broader context of driving Linux adoption by poaching a specific subset of Windows users, which this change is directly in service of.
"On June 8, 2016, a standard FreeBSD 10.3 image was published into the Azure Marketplace. Microsoft published the image working as part of the FreeBSD community and in collaboration with the FreeBSD Foundation. This was a milestone
representing the culmination of several years of Microsoft collaboration with the FreeBSD community. FreeBSD is leveraged as the base OS for a number of virtual appliances running in Azure, and so Microsoft has a natural interest in making sure it runs well."
Your points are factually incorrect in several ways. But if I steelman your argument, Linux driving Windows compatibility for gaming could be bad for several reasons:
- adoption of NTSYNC may distort the technical roadmap of Linux. That's arguable, it comes down to technical details.
- we should ask game vendors to support Linux, not enable them to not support Linux. Unfortunately that ship has sailed and we already know that Linux gaming is not a market they care about.
- Windows and Microsoft are bad and Linux is good. That's an emotional argument. When MS was truly anti-Linux, this association would rightly trigger suspicion. But MS is not behind this effort.
I think the best hope for native Linux gaming at this point is that the Steam deck and Proton in general becomes so popular it makes it worth it to consider native Linux too.
Do you think MS still wants to be in the consumer OS market?
It's low revenue, fairly high expense, and the relevance of "which operating system do you use" is going down rapidly (see linux gaming getting good with MS's help). Businesses.. sure they'll keep using windows and paying for it, since they already have a huge amount of legacy systems/software and IT procedures/institutional knowledge - like IBM still doing mainframes - but consumers don't seem to care about that.
Most people basically seem to use their computer to run a browser, maybe some games, and maybe some office suite stuff, OS doesn't matter too much anymore.
Honestly I don't see any evidence that Microsoft wants anything. Every little fiefdom within Microsoft wants their own thing and no one cares about what is good for the company as a whole. There is at least one team that just wants to sell as many games as possible, and are no doubt looking at SteamOS as potential platform to target.
"The division owns intellectual property for some of the most popular, best-selling, and highest-grossing media franchises of all time, including Call of Duty, Candy Crush, Warcraft, Halo, Minecraft, and The Elder Scrolls."
Your point was that Microsoft "gives a couple of hoots" about which platform Gamepass is on, implying that they specifically care about making Gamepass not accessible on Linux. Them having a guide for Gamepass access on Linux proves the opposite.
But you're just nitpicking looking for an argument. So, goodbye.
I hate to break it to you, but Linux has always had a very significant amount of development done by and for various corporate interests. There are whole companies that exist solely to commercialize Linux.
Microsoft did not push these changes. Valve (and places like Collabora) did, because it meaningfully improves performance for emulated Windows games. You should probably at least get the basics of your story straight if you're going to scare yourself silly over something you don't understand.
Not really, Sony and Apple are good examples of how BSDs would have looked like if the AT&T lawsuit never happened, and UNIX vendors would keep using BSD on their UNIX flavours, also most likely no one would have cared for Linux if it wasn't for that lawsuit.
Without providing examples, like no giant lock (mostly gone on Linux, now), IOCP, less monolithic kernel, inherit async I/O in the kernel, et. al., your assertion going to be lost on those who see "Windows == bad", which it certainly is closer to the surface.
In what way do you view this as Microsoft taking control of Linux? This is an effort to support more users leaving Microsoft for Linux and taking their software with them.
